Fonts and font size

As in any Office application, select the text in the text box, whose font and / or font size is to be changed. If you click on the arrow pointing downwards, you can make a selection from the drop-down list of the various options present in the “Formatting toolbar”.

If the box is empty, you can specify these settings, before you start typing.

Text Effects

You not only have the “Font” and “Font Size” options to format text, but also the “Text Effects” options.

Select the text in the text box and click on “Format” in the “Menu bar”.
Select “Font” from the drop-down menu.

This opens the “Font” dialog box.
The “Font” dialog box is divided into three parts.
First we have the “General” section.
Here, we can change the “Font”, “Font style” or “Font size”. We can also underline the text, and change the color.

After the “General” section we have the “Effects” section.

All these options seem quite obvious to me.

In the “Sample” section you can view a preview of how the text, with its effects, will look, in your publication.

Drop Cap

In “Publisher”, we have the “Drop Cap” option.
First select the text box and click on “Format” in the menu bar.
Select the “Drop Cap” option from the drop-down menu.
This opens a dialog box with two tabs.
The first tab in the “Drop Cap” dialog box shows all the available “Drop cap” styles.
Click on the scroll bars at the bottom of the preview window to view the other “Drop cap” styles.

In the second tab “Custom drop cap”, we can specify various options for the drop cap style.

Attention!
When the check boxes at the bottom section are checked, the adjacent textbox is unavailable. For example, if the “Use Current color” check box is selected, you will not have the option of changing the color of the text.

Character Spacing

To modify the distance between the different characters in the text, click on “Format” in the menu bar and select “Character Spacing” from the drop-down menu.

The dialog box that appears, is divided into five parts.

The first section is “Scaling” which is used to shrink or stretch the selected text

The “Tracking” section is used to adjust the spacing of the highlighted block of text .

We use the “Kerning” section to fine-tune the spacing between two characters.
For example, the spacing between the letters A and V will not, normally, be the same as the spacing between the letters A and G.
If you want the same spacing between these characters also, you can use this option.

When the last section is checked, you can set the “Kerning” between pairs of letters to a preset font size.

Line Spacing

 To adjust the spacing between the lines, click on the “Line spacing” button in the “Formatting toolbar”.
This opens the “Paragraph” dialog box.

A second way to open this dialog box is to click on “Format” in the menu bar and select “Paragraph” from the drop-down menu.

The “Indents and Spacing” tab is divided into three sections.

In the first section, we set the alignment of the text.
The second section is used to set the indentation of the text.

And in the last section we can set the spacing between two lines.
Just click on the up- arrow, if you wish to increase the space between the lines, and click on the arrow pointing downwards if you wish to decrease the space between the lines.

With the help of the “Before paragraphs” and “After paragraphs” text boxes, we determine the spacing between paragraphs.

Best Fit

Sometimes the text box might be much too large for the text it stores.
You can adjust its size, by clicking on and dragging the circle present at the edges of the box, or you can adjust the font size of the text.
The first is, perhaps, not a good idea when the layout of your publication is set to the size of the text box.
The second option can be used until we hit upon the correct font size.
Don’t worry, Publisher has a solution.
Select all text in the text box.
Click on the “Format” tab in the “Menu bar”, select the “AutoFit Text” option from the drop-down menu, and then select the “Best Fit” option.

This will make the text in the text box as large as possible.

The reverse of this is also possible.
Suppose you have a lot of text in a text box, so that the last lines are not readable.
You can adjust the size of the text box so that these lines are now visible.

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