Home

Glossary

 
 Application Icon The Format Menu
 

The Format menu contains all the commands and options dealing with all aspects of text formatting. Here you'll find the standard font, alignment, and ruler commands, as well as very special DEVONthink Personal commands.

Note: Many commands in this menu only work with rich text documents, as plain text documents do not allow formatting (that's why they're called 'plain' text). Some formatting options are also available for editable PDFs and web archives.


Font

Font: This sub-menu is reponsible for controllig the font as well as the document background color (rich text documents only). Open the fonts panel with Show Fonts, then increase or decrase the font size of selected text with Bigger and Smaller, adjust the text styles and the document background color.

Copy the font formatting of a selected piece of text or the passage of text around the insertion caret with Copy Font. You can then apply the formatting to selected text using Paste Font.

Style: The commands in this sub-menu apply a certain style, such as italics, bold, or underlined, to selected text. Also, the commands give you access to some high-end font control like kerning, baseline shift, ligatures, and character shape (only applicable to Asian languages).

The most interesting part here is Styles, which opens the Mac OS X Styles Editor. You can step through all the styles used in the current document and add them to your favorites. Use the pop-up menu to select a saved style and, if you don't need it any more, delete it. You can use saved styles from the ruler (see below).

Note: If you think the user interface for the styles editor is less-than-wonderful, you're right. But don't blame us, it's Apple's design :-)

Alignment: Align paragraphs left, right, centered, or justified. Here, Asian or Arabic users can also change the direction of writing, if necessary.

Ruler: Show the ruler, which shows the tab stops and contains alignment and styles buttons; copy the current ruler (line width, indents, tab stops, etc.) and paste it somewhere else.

Learn more about the ruler and the Styles Editor here.


Highlight

Highlight, Highlight Color: In rich text documents, editable PDFs, and web archives use Highlight to highlight a selected piece of text as you would do with a colored pen on a piece of paper. To remove highlighting, select the highlighted piece of text and choose Highlight again. Use the Highlight Color sub-menu to choose your favorite highlight color.


Spacing

Spacing: This command is only available in rich text documents; the command allows you to adjust the line spacing of selected text. You can adjust the line height to an exact value or define a minimum and maximum height, adjust inter-line spacing, and define the space before and after a paragraph.

Note: Paragraph spacings are not added to those of the preceding or following paragraph; instead, the maximum spacings from both paragraphs are used to ensure a proper layout.

Link: Makes selected text a link to a URL (for example, to a web page or to an email address). This is a one-step command for writing the address into a rich text document, selecting the address, selecting Make Link (see below), and then changing the linked text to anything you want.

List: Creates a bullet list. Select your prefix, bullet style, and suffix in the dialog sheet and click OK to insert your list skeleton. In the list, press Return to insert new items and press Tab and Shift-Tab to indent/de-indent items just as you would do in any word processor.

Table: Inserts a new table into a rich text document and opens the table inspector panel. Use the table inspector to adjust the number of rows and columns, cell alignments, cell colors, border width, and color. Also, you can merge and split cells and create tables within a cell.


Make Link

Link: Makes the selected text clickable and asks for a destination. Enter any valid URL you want the text to link to.

Make/Remove Link: Makes selected text clickable, or removes a link from the current selection. Where you are taken to when you click the link depends on the selected text:

  • If the text was a valid URL, the URL will be the target of the link. Editing the link text later does not change the target. Use the Edit Link command of the contextual menu to edit the link target.
  • Otherwise, DEVONthink Personal treats the link as a Wiki-style link. Clicking the Wiki-style link jumps to a document with exactly the same name as the linked text (or any document with a Wiki alias of that name). If there is no document of that name, clicking the link creates a new rich text document named after the linked text and pre-filled with the template you set in the Preferences, Editing tab.

Make Plain/Rich Text: Converts a rich text document to plain text and vice versa. Converting a rich text to plain text removes all formatting, converting a plain text document to rich text applies default rich text font settings to the document.


Invisibles

Show Colors: Shows the color panel, e.g., for changing the foreground color of selected text in rich text documents.

Show Invisible Characters: Toggles display of invisible characters such as spaces, tabs, and line feeds. Shown invisible characters appear in light gray.

Allow Hypenation: Enables or disables hyphenation for the current rich text document.

← The Data Menu

The View Menu →