While the Text module is used mainly for entering, editing and
formatting your text, the Text style module allows you to change the
appearance of individual letters or entire words, paragraphs, frames
or even piping chains. By producing glyphs (character images) in the
computer, Calamus opens up more possibilities than almost any other
DTP program. The selection of fonts is practically unlimited, any
character – depending on the unit of measure – can be over
a metre or up to 999.99 points high (see Page module, Units of
measurement
function group), without unpleasant corners, edges or
stepping effects. In addition to the usual text effects like
Underlined
, Outlined
and Shadowed
, Calamus allows
you to stretch or compress as well as slant the characters at any
angle you like. You may turn off proportional type to make tables.
Even writing from right to left is no problem for Calamus. Character
and word spacing are adjustable of course, as are the colour and fill
pattern of the text, underline, outline and shadow. You may store the
text styles in a list and call them up with a single click at any
time.
Working in the Text style module is much like working in the Text
module. Although you can also switch between Text mode and Ruler mode
in the Text style module, to change rulers you must enter the Text
module. The most important function in the Text style module is
selecting text blocks. You can either drag the mouse over the desired
text with the left button pressed (see Text module), or mark it using
Start block
and End block
functions of the Macros
function group in the Text module. This function allows you to work
with blocks longer than a single page. The third option is to click on
Select all
in the Options menu to select all the text in the
current piping chain.
In addition to freely altering the appearance of the text, you can – and should – store the text styles used in your document in a list. The principle behind this is exactly the same as for master pages: Besides providing a clearer overview, this gives you the option of altering several parts of your document simultaneously. For instance, you can assign the same text style in the list to all chapter headings. If you change your mind later and want to set the headings in another font, size or style, you can simply alter this text style in the list and immediately all headings will be transformed.
Which of these two principles (free design or style list) is to be
used can be set in the Misc. settings
dialog (see Misc.
settings
function, below). Here too you can choose whether the
internal (free) text styles should also be displayed in the Text style
list. These two methods of working will be called Free text style
mode
and Style list mode
in the following sections. For the
reasons mentioned above the style list mode is recommended for
professional text layout.