OpenOffice.Org 1.0 Resource Kit

This section describes the more advanced character formatting options of the Character format window.

1. Select the text you want to format.

2. Choose Format > Character. The Character window is displayed.

3. Apply the character formats you want and click OK.

When selecting text to apply character formatting, be aware of selecting spaces at the beginning or end of the selection, because the spaces get formatted, too. For example, if you're applying a fixed-width font (such as courier ) to some selected text and you've selected the space after the text, the space will become fixed-width and may make the spacing seem too big. To avoid this, select a word by double-clicking it. To select more than one word, double-click the first word and drag through the other words you want to select.

Figure 7-3 through Figure 7-5 describe character formatting options on each of the tabs in the Character window. For Asian formatting specific tabs, see Figure 7-11 Figure 7-12.

Note

Pair kerning puts characters closer together to improve text appearance.

Making Horizontal Text Fit Within the Line Spacing Height (Using the Fit to Line Option)

What the feature does

The Fit to Line option from Figure 7-5 fits the vertical text into the height of the line as shown in Figure 7-6.

The height of the line, or leading , is controlled by the setting in the Paragraph window. Choose Format > Paragraph and select the Indents & Spacing tab. It's Single by default, i.e., equivalent, more or less, to the font size or a little bit bigger. Unless you want a really squished vertical word, or unless your vertical text is a lot smaller, you want the leading to be bigger than single spacing.

Rules for making it work

To make the Fit to Line feature work, you must follow these rules:

• Under Format > Paragraph > Alignment, select only Top, Middle, or Bottom in the Alignment list. This is not optional.

• Do it right the first time. (You never knew vertical leading formatting could be so unforgiving.) If you set the vertical line spacing, then twist the text and make it vertical and fit it to the line at that time, that's great. But then changing the vertical line spacing to something different won't update how squished or expanded the vertical text is. You'll have to select the text, choose Format > Default, and start all over again.

Applying the Fit to Line feature

Follow these steps.

1. Choose Format > Paragraph and select the Indents & Spacing tab. Under the Line Spacing heading, set the correct line spacing.

2. Select the text you want to be vertical and run into the horizontal text.

3. Choose Format > Character and click the Position tab.

4. Select the appropriate horizontal setting, 90 degrees or 270 degrees, then select Fit to Line. See Figure 7-7 to see the settings to apply; see Figure 7-8 for an example of how it works.

   Figure 7-7. Setting horizontal and Fit to Line options

   Figure 7-8. How Fit to Line works

Related advanced formatting features

This feature is kind of like the feature that lets you make a few letters bigger than all the others, but keeping the text horizontal. Kind of like those big letters at the beginning of old manuscripts. See Figure 7-22 on page 215. See also Adding Vertical and Diagonal Text to Documents on page 244.

Changing Text Width With Scale Width and Spacing Options

Figure 7-9 shows the differences between scale width (changing the font width) and spacing (changing the width of the spaces between text).

Figure 7-10 shows the background tab for characters.

Putting Two Characters Together (Pair Kerning)

Pair kerning also supports non-English characters (ligatures) such as . Your printer driver must support ligatures to display and print them correctly.

Asian Character Formatting

Ensure that you've set up Asian text formatting correctly using the information in Enabling and Setting Up Asian Fonts and Formatting on page 108. Then make the appropriate selections in Figure 7-11 and Figure 7-12.

Asian Language Support must be enabled; see Figure 5-10 on page 109.