EasiWriter allows you to group many formatting commands into a single named command called a style.
Styles can be created for emphases and structures. Emphasis styles are appended to the Text submenu and Structure styles appear in the Format submenu. Each structure has a default style which you can change. You can also add new styles.
In this part of the tutorial you will learn how to:
Emphasis styles allow you to control the attributes of text including its font, size, language, colour etc. Using an emphasis style you could for example change a word into Trinity.bold, upper case , red with a single command.
Structure styles vary according to the type of structure.
For example the first section on this page of the manual has a right aligned, hanging heading in Homerton.Bold.Oblique 14 points with 10 point Trinity.medium body text with eight points additional spacing after sections. The Heading and body text are separated with a thin vertical rule and the section automatically starts a new page.
This amounts to a lot of formatting attributes but just one style definition. In fact the whole of this tutorial was written in EasiWriter using just two section styles.
Just choosing Main section from the Structure menu caused all the attributes described above to be applied automatically.
You are going to use the text for Exercise one of this tutorial to learn how to create, modify and use your own styles.
First you need to open the document called 'Chapter1'.
If you scroll through the document you will see that there are four pages of formatted text with two full size, centred, sprites showing an EasiWriter window and the 'Save document' menu.
First you are going to change the scale of the pictures to 50% and then align them to the left.
You could make the changes to each picture individually, but it makes much more sense to change the default picture style so that all the pictures in the document are exactly the same.
A red border indicates that the picture is selected. The Style indicator says 'Picture Style'. Each structure has one built in or default style that is used whenever you create a new structure. If you look at the Format menu when a picture is selected you will see that this default style appears as a submenu.
If you create new picture styles they will appear in this menu. If you have more than one style they will also appear if you click Menu on the Picture button.
Next you are going to halve the picture size.
The picture will be reduced to 50% full size.
Pictures, like text, can be aligned to the left, centre or right. While the picture is selected one of the alignment icons will be 'pressed in' to show you which alignment is selected.
Next you are going to align the picture to the left.
The picture will move to align with the left margin marker.
If you look at the Style indicator, in the top right hand corner of the window, you will see that it has changed to 'Picture Style *'.
The '*' shows that the picture style has been overridden with some changes.
When you have made a change to any style you can do one of two things:
We want to change all the pictures in this document, so must save the style changes without changing the name.
The Save Style Changes dialogue box will appear. It shows the style name plus a description of any modifications that have been made to it.
All the pictures in the document that use this style (in this case the other one) will change to 50% scaling, left aligned.
Any new pictures incorporated into this document will automatically be left aligned and 50% reduced in size as this is now the default style setting.
Note that now the picture style has been updated the '*' has been removed.
Unique to EasiWriter is the ability to control the entire formatting attributes of a structure using a single style definition. For a section this means that the position and type specifications of both its heading and body text, plus any borders and rules that may be applied to it, can be controlled with a single style command.
To see how this works you are going to change the type face and size used for the heading, change its position from above its body text to the left hand side and draw a rule between the heading and the section's body text.
Using Control with the up and down arrow keys is a quick way of moving the caret to the beginning and end of the document.
The left and right arrows keys used in conjunction with control move the caret to the beginning and end of paragraphs.
The caret will move to the beginning of the document.
Before making any changes to the section heading, you need to select it.
The selection indicator will change to 'Section Heading'.
Next you are going to change the font to Homerton and its size to 10 points.
The Type style... command allows you to make both these changes at the same time. It also lets you underline and strike-out text as well as choose different heights and widths for fonts.
The Type style dialogue box will appear.
Next you are going to align the heading to the right margin.
The Heading will move to align with its right margin marker.
Now you are going to select the section and change its format.
The Section Format dialogue box appears where you can:
Other controls let you balance and vertically justify the text in columns, and automatically indent paragraphs. These and other aspects of Section formats are fully described in Chapter two - Using EasiWriter.
At the top of the dialogue box you will see the heading position icons. Running from left to right they are: No heading, Heading inside columns, Heading above columns, Hanging heading.
The section will be reformatted.
To change every section in the document to this new style save the style changes with the same name, just as was done for the picture style.
Scroll through the document and you will see that every section in the document has been reformatted.
When you have made some changes to a structure, paragraph or text that you want to use in another part of the document you can save those changes as a style.
Next you are going to create a new section style to see how this works.
Make sure that the Selection indicator says 'Section Heading'. You are going to increase its point size and change its font to oblique.
Next you are going to give the section the property of starting a new page. First you need to select the entire section.
As this section already starts a new page you will not see any effect from this change for the moment.
Now that the style change has been made, you can create a new style.
To create a new section style, you first select the section that has the changes you want and then save the style changes with a new name.
If you look in the Section styles submenu you will see that EasiWriter has appended this new style.
You will also notice that the Ctrl-F10 has been automatically added to the new style for use as a keyboard short-cut.
Styles can be changed by selecting the structure and then choosing the new style from the Style submenu or by using the keyboard short-cut.
To see how this works try the following:
If you scroll down you will see that not only has the heading changed to 14 point Homerton.Oblique, but the section has also started a new page.
You can change back to the previous style by choosing it from the Section style menu or by typing its keyboard short-cut Ctrl-F9.
The Undo command (F8) can also be used to undo a style change.
All parts of an EasiWriter document can have styles created for them. Next you are going to learn how to create and use Paragraph styles.
Paragraph styles can control the margins, tabs, font, font size, colour, language and the spacing between lines as well as the extra spacing both before and after the paragraph.
For this document we need to make a simple change to the paragraphs that contain text that the user is required to type. For example:
This is the style we use for text that is to be typed.
By changing the font to Corpus medium it is much easier for the user to distinguish between informative text and text to be typed.
The paragraph font will change to Corpus medium and the document will be reformatted.
As there are several paragraphs in the tutorial that indicate text to be typed it is a good idea to create a paragraph style for them. You can then change the appearance of subsequent paragraphs with a single keystroke.
EasiWriter will create the new paragraph style and will allocate Ctrl-F10 as its keyboard short-cut.
The style used for a paragraph can be changed by simply moving the caret into it and choosing the new style from the Paragraph style menu. Unlike other structures, paragraphs do not need to be completely selected before having a style applied to them.
The paragraph will have been reformatted in the new style.
Next you are going to apply the style using the keyboard short-cut.
Once again the paragraph is reformatted.
Emphasis styles are used to change the appearance of individual parts of text such as words or cells in a table. They are added to the Text submenu.
EasiWriter appends Ctrl-F6, Ctrl-F7 and Ctrl-F8, for use as keyboard short-cuts, to the first three emphasis styles that are created.
All documents have Bold and Italic, and a style called Plain which is used to remove emphasis.
Later you will create a new emphasis style. First you will use the existing styles.
Next you are going to change some words on the second page of the document to bold.
EasiWriter has a Go to page command that lets you go directly to any page in the document.
The second page of the document will be scrolled into view.
You are going to change the words 'Cut' and 'Paste' in list item '2' into bold as they represent menu items.
Emphasis styles can also be used as you type. The following exercise will show you how to do this. Note that TechWriter has different keyboard short-cuts to EasiWriter.
You will see that the text you typed was changed to bold.
Next you will change the typeface to italic and then revert back to the normal typeface for the paragraph.
Emphasis styles are created in the same way as other styles. First make the changes you want to the text, then choose Save style changes from the Format menu. You are going to create an Emphasis style for keys that the user has to press such as Return and Delete.
First you are going to use the Find routine to find the first occurrence of the word 'return' in the document.
The find dialogue box will disappear and the first instance of 'return' in the document will be selected.
By convention the words representing keys should start with a capital letter. You will see that this 'return' does not. Rather than search the entire document editing each 'return' we can make this property part of the style definition so that it happens automatically.
You will see that the 'r' has been automatically capitalised. Other commands in this menu let you choose Upper case, Lower case and As typed (unmodified).
Next you are going to make the word bold.
Finally save these changes as a style.
The new style will be added to the Text menu and will have Ctrl-F6 (Ctrl-F7 TechWriter) appended to it for use as a keyboard short-cut.
Next you will search for more occurrences of the word 'return'.
EasiWriter has a special command that lets you repeat a search without having to open the search dialogue box.
EasiWriter will find the next occurrence of the word 'return', this time in a heading. As you don't need to change this one you can skip over it by choosing Find same again.
Notice that not only did the font change but also the first letter was capitalised.
There are no more occurrences of the word 'return' in this document. If you choose Find same again EasiWriter will beep to tell you that it can't find any more. Try changing occurrences of the word 'Delete' into the Keystroke style.
In addition to enabling many formatting commands to be applied with a single command or keystroke, styles allow you to make global changes to a document. For example, suppose we decide that the Keystroke style might look better if it were Italic rather than Bold; all we need do is to change the style definition and all text that uses that style will be reformatted.
If you scroll through the document you will see that all the occurrences of 'Return' and 'Delete' have changed.
The final part of this exercise will be to create a new list style. You will then change some paragraphs into a list and apply the new style to them.
You will see this tutorial has three list styles:
The first two list styles have already been created. You are going to create the Square bullet style. First you will edit an existing list style and then save the change as a new style.
When a list is selected the Change... command leads to the List format dialogue box where you can edit the bullet character.
Notice that EasiWriter has changed all the bullets in the list.
Next you are going to save these changes as a new style.
There are two ways to create a list;
You are going to use the last method to convert the last four paragraphs in the document into a list in the same style as the one you have just edited.
All four paragraphs will be selected. You can now turn them into a list.
The paragraphs will be changed into a square bulleted list.
In this part of the tutorial you have learnt how to:
That concludes this part of the tutorial.