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Text |
Serif vs. San Serif |
Paintbrush |
Bullets & Numbering |
Symbols |
Horizontal
Lines
Text
Always use high contrast between your text color and your
background color for easy readability. A rule of thumb is to pick several fonts to
use within your document: One for your heading, one for your
subheading, and one for your body text. Ariel or
Veranda 12 pt. are good sans-serif fonts for
body text and Times New
Roman 18
and 14 pt. bold are good serif fonts for headings and subheadings.
Arial Rounded MT Bold is also a good
font for headings and subheadings. It is all a matter of taste!
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Times New Roman &
Arial
Heading
Subheading
Body Text |
Arial Rounded MT Bold
& Arial
Heading
Subheading
Body Tex |
Use bold and/or italicized text when you want to
emphasize your text. Do not underline text –
underlining usually represents a hyperlink. Left justify
your text using centering and right justification only when needed,
and don’t animate text because it is difficult on the eyes,
especially for people with visual impairments.
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Serif
Sans Serif |
Serif versus Sans-Serif
Notice the extra lines at the end of the strokes in the left
character. This is a serif
font.
The right character does not have these
strokes and is said to be a sans-serif font. (Sans is the
French word for without.) Times New Roman is a commonly used
serif
font. Arial is a commonly used sans-serif fonts.
Serif fonts are
usually easier to read than sans-serif fonts. This is because the serif
makes the individual letters more distinctive and easier to
recognize quickly. The commonly used convention for printed work is
to use a serif font for the body of the work and a sans-serif font
for the headings because printed works generally have a resolution of at
least 600 dots per inch; whereas, computer monitors are usually only
72 dots per inch. This lesser resolution can make very small
serif characters harder to read than the equivalent sans-serif
characters because of their more complex shapes. Therefore, sans-serif fonts should be used for body text and serif fonts for
headings on the Web.
Paintbrush
If you
create a text format you really like, you can copy it and apply it
to other text. For example, say you've created a sub-heading Arial,
12-pt, bold text. You can use Format Painter to consistently
apply this format to all your sub-headings. To copy the format of
your text, select the text with the format you want to copy. Click
the Format Painter button on the Standard toolbar. The
cursor turns into a paintbrush. Use the paintbrush to select
another body of text. This "paints" the text with the same
format as the text you selected in the previous step. If you
want to format several sections of text at one time, double click on
the paintbrush instead of single clicking.
Bullets and Numbering
If you need to add Bullets and/or
Numbering to your text, you can do so by creating a list,
highlighting the list, and clicking on either the Bullet or
Numbering button in the Toolbar or by clicking on
Format, Bullets and Numbering, Plain
Bullets, or Numbers. If you want to create your own
picture bullets, click on the Picture Bullets tab and
select either Use Pictures from Current Theme or Specify
Picture. Browse for the location of the picture and click
OK. You may need to resize the bullet once it has been
inserted.
If you would like to add
more vertical spacing between your list items, click on Format,
Paragraph, and Spacing. You can add spacing
before or after a word or sentence. I usually add 6 or 12 points
spacing before or after a word or sentence.
Remember when
spacing that hitting the Enter key will add paragraph
(double spacing) to the
sentence, while Shift + Enter will add single spacing,
but single pacing takes on the attributes of the previous line. Do
not use single spacing if you do not want to take on the
attributes of the previous line.
The table below shows the
difference between regular bullet spacing in the left column, and 6
pt. spacing in the middle column. The right column is an example of a
bulleted list using a graphic.
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Template
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Tables
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Borders
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Graphics
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Template
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Tables
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Borders
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Graphics
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Template
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Borders
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Graphics |
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Symbols
You can insert a Symbol into your text by clicking on
Insert, Symbol, selecting a symbol, Insert, and
Close. Here is an example of an inserted symbol, Trademark™.
Inserting a Horizontal Line
If you want to separate items or sections of text, you can insert a
horizontal line. Click Insert and Horizontal Line.
You can format the line’s color and width by right clicking on the
line and setting the horizontal line properties.
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