Formatting and layout

The panel that appears

Select some words and a panel opens on the right, holding everything you can do to whatever you selected. Select a picture instead and it holds picture controls; select a table cell and it holds table controls. It is the same panel each time, showing a different set of things.

1. Select the words, the picture or the cell.
2. The panel opens by itself. It waits until you have finished selecting, so it does not slide in while you are still dragging.
3. Make the change. It happens straight away, on the page, with nothing to confirm.
4. Esc closes the panel and puts the cursor back in your writing.

Bold, italic and the rest

Bold, italic, underline, strikethrough and inline code, which sets a few words in a typewriter face for a file name or a command. The usual keyboard shortcuts work too, so Ctrl B is quicker than reaching for the panel.

The same panel is where you turn selected words into a heading or a quote, and where you leave a comment on them. Comments covers that part.

Colour and highlight

Seven colours, each in three strengths, for twenty one in total, plus a tint to highlight behind the words as if with a marker pen.

They are named colours rather than exact ones on purpose. Each has its own version for light and for dark, so a passage you made red stays readable when a reader switches theme. If you pick an exact colour of your own instead, that one colour is used in both themes, which is worth knowing before you choose a pale one.

Size and spacing

Text size and line height can both be set by hand. Most documents never need either: the sizes that come with a heading are already in proportion. They are there for the occasional line that has to be bigger, on a published page more often than in a note to yourself.

Links

Select some words and add a link, and those words become the link. The panel holds the address, whether it opens in this tab or a new one, and a way to remove it again.

Pictures and video

A picture can be given a size, rounded corners, a shadow, and an alignment on the page. Corners can be set all together or each on its own. There is a control to make it fill the width of the page, and one to put it back to the size it came in at.

A video gets the same treatment, minus the ones that make no sense for something that plays.

Tables and layouts

Put the cursor in a cell and the panel offers everything a table needs: add a row above or below, add a column left or right, delete either, select a whole row or column, merge cells, and split one back apart.

The header row and header column can each be turned on or off. Turn both off, along with the lines, and a table becomes a layout: a way of putting two or three things side by side without a grid showing around them.

Cells take their own background colour and their own padding, and the gaps between rows and columns can be set separately.

Buttons

A button has a name, an address it goes to, and a choice of opening in this tab or a new one. You can set its colour, its colour on hover, its corners and its padding, duplicate it, and copy it to paste elsewhere.

The page itself

Two settings belong to the whole document rather than to anything selected in it.

Page width. Standard keeps the writing in a column that is comfortable to read. Full lets it run the whole width of the window, which suits a wide table or a page built out of layouts.

Background colour. The document can be given a background of its own. It is most useful on a page you are going to publish, where it is the difference between a page that looks like a document and one that looks like a site.

The typeface you write in

The typeface is not set per document. It is a setting on your account, so everything you write uses it, and it is in Settings under Appearance. There is a choice of faces to read in and a separate choice for code. Settings has the list.