About formatting text and paragraphs

You can format text and paragraphs in Microsoft FrontPage as you would using a word processor — to add visual organization, emphasis, and structure. You can change the font, size, style, color, spacing, and vertical position of text, and add effects such as underlining. You can also control spacing and indentation, add bullets and numbers, and set alignment.

The formatting you apply can either affect selected words or an entire paragraph. A general rule is that font properties (such as font, size, color, highlighting, and effects) can be applied to selected text, and paragraph properties (including bullets, numbering, shading, and borders) affect entire paragraphs. For example, you can italicize a single word in a paragraph, but if you try to align the word to the right, the entire paragraph will be aligned.

Formatting individual characters and words

Properties that you can set for words or characters include:

Formatting paragraphs

A paragraph is a block of text that is separated from another by a paragraph mark Paragraph mark. If lines of text are separated by line breaks Line break, the text is considered to be one paragraph. The paragraph mark Paragraph mark and the line break Line break are hidden characters that can be displayed if needed.

Properties that you can set that will apply to entire paragraphs include:

Bulleted, numbered, definition, and multilevel lists

You can quickly add bullets or numbers to existing lines of text, or you can automatically create bulleted and numbered lists as you type. If you're creating bulleted lists for web pages, you can use any graphical image or picture as a bullet.

Bulleted list

You can create a bulleted list for presenting a list of unordered items — that is, items that don't need to be numbered:

Custom bulleted list

You canalso create graphics and use them as bullets, rather than using the standard default bullets (circles or squares).

Numbered list

To display a sequential list of items, create a numbered list. You can choose from letters, numbers, or Roman numerals:

  1. Do this first
  2. Do this second
  3. Do this third

Definition list

When you want to present a list of terms and definitions, add a definition list to your page. Terms are usually displayed flush left, with indented definitions. The exact formatting of the list depends on the Web browser being used.

Term A
This is the definition for Term A.
Term B
This is the definition for Term B.

Outline or multilevel list

You can create lists that have multiple nested levels and paragraphs, and specify different list styles for each level. For example, an outline:

  1. Chapter
    1. Heading
      1. Subheading
        1. Topic

          Paragraph

        2. Topic
          1. Detail
          2. Detail
    2. Heading

The list above uses different numbering styles at each level. If a heading has only one item below it, you can list the item without numbers (note the way "Paragraph" is displayed above).

Collapsible lists

You can create a collapsible list from a multilevel bulleted or numbered list, or from an outline. A collapsible list lets the site visitor show or hide different levels of the list by double-clicking an item.

The following is an example of list is an example of a multilevel outline list, with each level using a different style. This list is also collapsible:

Styles and themes

A style is a collection of character and paragraph settings. Applying a style to text is a one-step procedure and a much quicker way to format text than by formatting each paragraph of text individually. Your text is also more consistently formatted by using styles.

For example, to make the main headings stand out from other text, apply the style Heading 1, and leave body text styled as Normal (the default), which uses a smaller font. You can still apply additional formatting to text that has a style applied to it, for example to underline a word. You can create and modify styles, and create your own external style sheets, such as a cascading style sheet.

You can also use themes to format your text automatically, because each theme contains predefined styles. If you want to change the appearance of text that has a theme applied to it, you can either modify the styles used by the theme or apply formatting to selected text.