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Editing Text

As we mentioned earlier, text editing in VoodooPad is very similar to editing the text in a Rich Text document using TextEdit (and most other rich text editors on the Mac). However, because the rich text features of the Mac's text system are more similar to a word processor than to a simple text editor, we'll review a few of these features to be sure you're aware of their availability in VoodooPad.

On the other hand, because most of this functionality is so basic to Mac OS X, we'll make use of the hyperlinking capability of VoodooPad to reference much of this topic so you can move through it quickly if it's already familiar. If you see an editing capability referenced followed by the parenthesized note: "see edit details", simply click on the edit details link. The resulting page will have a link back to this one.

Open a new VoodooPad document by choosing File->New Document, or by pressing Shft-Cmd-N on the keyboard. When the the new window opens you should see the same document, with the heading: "VoodooPad, You put your brain in it." that you saw the last time we created a new VoodooPad document.

Letter, Word and Paragraph Selection

We can select a letter, word or paragraph by clicking and dragging across them. Dragging across letters contains no surprises (see edit details). Doing so allows us to demonstrate text resizing on individual letters in a word (see edit details).

Notice the ease with which you can precisely select words by double clicking on the first and dragging across more (see edit details). We can also add to existing text properties in a selection (see edit details).

Finally, a paragraph is most easily selected by triple clicking and multiple paragraphs are easily selected by triple clicking and dragging (see edit details).

Multiple Undo

As with most things Macintosh, we can undo what we've done by choosing Edit->Undo or pressing the Cmd-z keys. In fact, if we press Cmd-z often enough, or simply hold it down for a few seconds, we can undo all the changes we've just made on this page.

Font Properties

Triple click to select the first paragraph of the page. Now choose Format->Font->Strike Out. We can undo the strike outs by pressing Cmd-z or by choosing Format->Font->Strike Out again while the strike out text is still selected.

Click on the Format menu item and drag to the Font item to see its submenu. Notice the things you can do directly from this menu:

• Bold, Italic, Strike Out, Underline to change font properties
• Bigger, Smaller to incrementally increase or decrease the selected text size
• Kern to spread letters apart or compress them horizontally
• Ligature to add ligatures used in your font
• Baseline to raise or lower the baseline of selected text

...and so forth.

Feel free to play with these properties if you're not familiar with them. In particular, with some text selected, choose Underline. Notice that rather than underlining the text, VoodooPad instead displays this panel:

The reason for this preference is that VoodooPad uses both underlining and text color to indicate links. It can be difficult to determine which underlined words really represent links if non-link words and phrases are also underlined and/or colored. Use the application's Preferences panel to change from the default with care.

With the first paragraph still selected, choose Format->Font->Show Fonts to bring up the Font pallette. This allows us to choose a new font for the selected text, change it's size and many other of it's properties.

To create the perception of lifting some text off the page, for instance, try clicking on the rectangle centered directly under the "Font" title of the Font pallette. To confirm that you've selected the correct rectangle, just hold the mouse pointer on the rectangle for a few moments until a tool tip pops up indicating that this is the Text Shadow rectangle. If it says something else, try again.

With the first paragraph selected when this rectangle is activated, the text in the paragraph will display shadows for each character. Directly to the right of the rectangle are three sliders, slide the first about 2/3 of the way towards the right, slide the second about 1/8 from the left and slide the third about 3/4 of the way toward the right.

As you do this, notice how the text seems to lift off the page. You can also click and drag the small indentation in the circle to the right of the third slider. As you do this, you'll see an apparent shift of the virtual light illuminating the text to cast the shadows at a changing angle.

Font Colors

You can also choose Format->Font->Show Colors to display the color pallette. However, like underlining, by default you will not be able to change text colors. Choose VoodooPad->Preferences... and select the Appearance tab to change this default behavior.

Text Alignment and the Ruler

In our overview, we touched on the text ruler. Triple click on the third paragraph to select the entire paragraph and bring the ruler up again by choosing Format->Text->Show Ruler.

The text ruler is primarily used for setting page margins, paragraph indentation, tabs and alignment or justification. It also has pop-down menus for selecting line spacing, bullet point styles and an alternate means of selecting font properties.

With the third paragraph still selected, click on the third tab in the ruler tab bar that looks like this:

This should justify (or straighten the edges of) the paragraph on both sides. Now select the document title, "You put your brain in it." and click the far left of the four tabs to left justify the title.

Setting Tabs

As a final demonstration of VoodooPad's standard text editing features, let's set some tab stops. First be sure that the VoodooPad window is wide enough by looking for the red Delete icon in the far right side of window's tool bar. If the far right icon is not the red Delete icon, then drag the lower right corner of the window to the right until red Delete icon appears.

Next scroll to the bottom of the page and click to place the text insertion bar at the very end of the text. Press the Return key a couple times to make some room. Then type in the following text. Note that as you do so, space each word or number from the others by a single tab:

Be sure that you've entered no spaces but only a single tab between each word or number. Then select all of the text in those five lines. With all five lines selected, go to the text ruler at the top of the window and drag all the tab stops that are to the left of the 5" mark out of the ruler. Don't worry if words or numbers in the five lines we've selected seem to go a bit berserk. We'll bring order to them shortly.

Look for the tab stop well at the far right of the ruler which looks like this:

Put your mouse pointer on each of the icons in the tab stop well for a couple seconds until a tool tips label appears. You should see that they are called from left to right respectively, the "Left tab stop", the "Center tab stop", the "Right tab stop" and the "Decimal tab stop".

Now drag a left tab stop from the tab stop well to the ruler and drop it at the top of the 3/4" mark. Next drag a Center tab stop from the well and drop it on the 2 1/4" mark. Next drag a Decimal tab stop from the well and drop it on the 3 1/4" mark. Finally, drag a Decimal tab stop from the well and drop it on the 4 1/4" mark.

If you've done this correctly, your five lines should now look like this:

Notice that the words in the Item column are left justified in the column. The numbers in the Quantity column are centered and the money amounts in the Price and Amount columns are aligned on their decimal points. Also notice a couple weaknesses in our formatting: the numbers in the number column should probably be centered in the column and the headers for the Price and Amount columns are right justified on the Decimal tab stops for each of those columns.

We could clean this up a bit by using different tab stops for the heading line then we used in the item and total lines, and by centering the numbers in the Number column, but we've demonstrated how the tab stops can be used and that was our objective in this tutorial.

If the resulting columnar list makes you uncomfortable, feel free to clean it up by inserting a tab at the left end of each of the last four lines, selecting only those four lines and adding a Center tab stop at the 1/4" mark. You can also select only the header line and replace the two Decimal tab stops there with two left tab stops placed at the 3" and the 4" marks. If you decide to do that, your result should look as follows:

But wait a minute, you say... the price for VoodooPad and FlySketch are $39.95, not $19.95! However, we reply, if you buy them in quantities of two or more, they're only $19.95 each.

Advanced Text Editing