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Advanced Text Editing

In our last topic, we demonstrated that VoodooPad shares the flexibility of the Mac OS X Text System as represented in TextEdit. However, VoodooPad provides text editing features beyond that basic set, features such as tables, flexible bullet lists, more sophisticated line and paragraph spacing, highlight colors and a convenient margin shift capability for more convenient outlining.

Tables

Let's open a new VoodooPad document by pressing Cmd-Shft-n, select everything in the window and delete it all with the delete key for a blank page.

Now enter a title, such as "Comparing Apples and Oranges" at the top of the document followed by two blank lines. You can do this by typing the title in, or by copying it from the previous sentence and pasting it in. Instead, let's drag the text to the new window.

To do this, double click on the word "Comparing" in the first sentence of the last paragraph, drag to the work "Oranges" and release the mouse button. Then click and hold the mouse within the selected text until the mouse pointer changes from an insertion bar to an arrow, then drag the selected text to the new blank VoodooPad window. Be sure to leave a couple blank lines after this title.

Next, let's add a 4 row X 2 column table to our document. Choose Format->Table... from the menu bar and notice that two things happened when you did so:

Since this is not quite the table configuration we wanted, let's change it. While the table is still selected, click on the Table control panel, change the rows to 4 and the columns to 2. You can do this either by selecting the "2" and pressing the 4 key, or by clicking twice on the up arrow immediately to the right of the Rows text field. When you've changed the Rows field, select the "3" in the columns field and type in 2, or click once on the down arrow immediately to the right of the Columns text field.

If the table hasn't changed its configuration, be sure that you've selected any cell of the table and that the window containing the table is the frontmost window. You can confirm this by noting that the three buttons in the upper left corner of the table are colored while you're changing the table's configuration.

Now let's enter some values into the table. In the top row, type "Fruit" in the left column and "Desirability" in the right. In the three rows of the left column under the heading "Fruit", type: "apples", "oranges" and "bananas". In the right hand column, type "7", "8", "10".

You've probably heard that it's not possible to compare apples to oranges. With VoodooPad, we quite often do what other's have found difficult to impossible. We've gone one better, in this case, and included bananas in our comparison. But what if you don't like the desirability levels we've chosen. Hey, it's your VoodooPad document; change the values to suit you. Just because we believe bananas to be the perfect fruit doesn't mean that you have to agree.

However, our goal here is to learn VoodooPad's special editing characteristics, so let's go back to making our page look better. To do that, first select the page title and press Cmd-t on the keyboard to bring up the font pallette. Then select some sans serif font in the "Family" column of the font table, such as Helvetica, click "Bold" in the Typeface column and either enter "18" in the size text field, or click on 18 in the column below that text field. Close the font pallette and while the title is still selected, choose Format->Text->Center (or just press the Cmd-Shft-| keys).

Next we want to center the numbers in the desirability column. To do that, let's make use of a little known trick in the Mac OS X text repertoire: column selection. To select a column, hold down the Option key as you click and drag the mouse from the top left of the first number to the bottom right of the last number in the desirability column.

As you do this, notice that only the bottom right three cells of the table are selected, which is exactly what we wanted. Now click on the Center alignment tab in the table control panel, which looks like this:

Let's next click and drag across the two heading cells at the top of the table to select the words "Fruit" and "Desirability" simultaneously. Then click on the Center alignment tab in the table control panel again and press Cmd-b to make both words bold. You wouldn't actually need to select both words to center them in their cells as long as some part of each of the two cells is selected. However, we needed the words selected to make them both bold.

To illustrate the flexibility of tables in VoodooPad, click anywhere in the table and increase the row count in the Table control panel from 4 to 5. Notice that a new row has been added to the bottom of the table. Next, we want to select the bottom two cells. The easiest way to do that is to double click in one of the cells of the new row and drag through the other. Then click the Merge Cells button in the Table control panel.

We should now have a single cell at the bottom of the table that spans the table width. Click in this new cell and type "* mostly cloned", and suffix the word, banana, above with an asterisk.