Lesson 3
Text Formatting
In the previous lesson we discussed the formatting that can be done to
entire paragraphs, now we will discuss formatting individual text. This
means you can format a whole page or just one character of text. Below is
a portion of the formatting toolbar that formats the text.
Font Face The first tool is the Font dropdown box. When you click on
the small arrow beside the box it will open with the list of fonts that are on
your computer. The screenshot on the right shows a partial list of the fonts on
my computer. Your list will look similar but most likely will not have any of
the fonts listed on mine. One thing to remember about fonts is that unless the
computer accessing your pages also has the font you are using they will not see
the page as you created it. It is best to stick to the fonts that are universal
to most computers, if you want a special font to be shown
you will have to familiarize yourself with a program called
Weft, or create text graphics. Creating
text graphics is quite often done for welcome messages, banners, etc. In order
to choose your font, you need to highlight all of the text that you want changed
then click on the small arrow and when you find the font you wish to use click
on it and your text will be displayed with that font.
Font
Size The next tool is another dropdown box which lists the font sizes. To
change the font you just need to highlight your text and then use the dropdown
box to resize your text. A sample of the dropdown box is shown in the screenshot
on the right.
By highlighting your
text and then clicking on this button you will be bolding your text.
Highlighting your
text and clicking on this button will change your text to italics
Highlighting your
text and clicking on this button will underline your text.
These two icons will
enlarge and shrink your text. Simply highlight the text you want to format and
click on the large A to enlarge your font or click on the small A to shrink your
font. Enlarged Shrink All this does
is places the font tag and size attribute into the HTML coding of the page.
When you highlight a portion or all of you page and then click on this button it
will put a border around the area you specify. As you can see in the screenshot
on the right, there are several different choices for creating a border around
the area you specify.
This is a sample of the border around the area.
This
button is used to highlight text that you have chosen. As with any of the above
buttons you just need to highlight the text you wish to permanently highlight
and then click the button. You can change the color to any that you prefer, by
clicking on the small arrow beside the button you will open a new window.
This page will tell you more about the color
charts.
This is a sample of
highlighted text using white for the highlighter
And finally you can
change your text color by clicking on the button shown on the left here. As with
the highlighter, a new window will pop up. See
this
page for color charts.
In my opinion the color
of the text is the most important part of creating a well designed
web page. The combination of your background and your text needs to
be well balanced and very easy to read. If that is not the case you
will probably lose visitors to your site. My personal opinion is
that in most cases a dark background does not do a page justice.
There are exceptions but most I have viewed with dark background and
light text are not impressive. Also a white background in my opinion
for some people is extremely hard to read. I recommend in most cases
to use a very light, soothing background with colored text that
compliments the background. Another thing to remember is that quite
often people think that using a different shade of the same color as
your background makes good web design, in truth it makes poor web
design and the text becomes hard to read for many people. My opinions come from studying colors in
relation to disabilities, the two colors that are in my opinion
friend colors are blue and green. They are often called calming
colors and a clear sheet of plastic with one of these colors helps
the dyslexic person to concentrate on the pages and learn to read.
They are also known to help other disabilities. It is wise to plan
your background and text to compliment each other.
