- FORMATTING THE TEXT
- CREATING HEADERS
- TIMESAVERS
- PASTE AND MATCH STYLE
- CREATING A LINK TO AN INTERNAL OR EXTERNAL PAGE
FORMATTING THE TEXT
I talked with Sean Johnson about the requirement to use Arial and Georgia, which is what the PD Style Guide specifies as preferred fonts. I basically said that Arial isn't especially attractive, and Georgia looks very heavy when there is a lot of body copy text. He said that we could change it up a bit as long as the fonts we choose are somewhat similar to Arial and Georgia. I played around a bit, and I think using Lora for all of the page titles and headings and Lato Light for the body looks pretty good.
Assuming you agree, I suggest that we use this font system:
- Chapter Title – Lora Medium size 64
- Page Title – Lora Medium size 48
- Section Title – Lora Regular size 18
- Body Copy – Lato Light size 14
I'm happy to go with something else if you don't like the way this looks – I'm just offering this system as a suggestion.
Creating Headers
If you have a long page with several subsections, you might consider changing the section background of the subsection's header. I like the dark blue background with white text. Here's how to implement that.
First, create a textBox, and then move your pointer to the three icons to the left. Click the pallet icon.
Second, select Emphasis 2 in the menu that opens.
Third, change the font and size of the text. I think using all caps looks pretty good.
Timesavers
I don't know about you, but I get really frustrated when I have to change a the font via a drop-down menu and then a fly-out menu. For example, if you were to scroll through the font drop-down menu until you get to Lato, you would then hover over the little arrow the right of the font name to open its family in the fly-out menu. However, if you don't get your pointer positioned properly, the menu will close, and then you will need to go through it all again.
Irritating.
To avoid this hassle, you can duplicate the text box and then just change the words. All you need to do is click on the middle icon of the three that are to the left of the text box:
You can then drag the text box (or any element on this part of the page) by clicking and holding on the two columns of little squares that appear to the right of the pallet, duplicate, and trash icons:
Paste and Match style
You can also save yourself a bit of time when copying and pasting text from a Google Doc to the site by using Paste and Match Style. Let's say you're going to copy and paste several paragraphs from Docs to the site, but the text in the Doc is in Helvetica. All you need to do is first format a bit of text in the text box so that it looks the way you want. Then, when you go to paste the content into the site, right-click on your mouse or trackpad. This little menu will pop up:
Select Paste and Match Style, and the text you are pasting should be the same as the little bit you already added to the text box.
Creating a Link to an internal or external page
If you want to create a link to an internal or external page, all you need to do is use your mouse or trackpad to select the text that you want to turn into a link. Once you have selected the text, a menu will pop up with formatting options. Click on the Insert link icon.
Once you click on the Insert link icon, a new menu will open that looks like this:
If you want to create a link to an internal page on the site, scroll through the list of pages that you have already created until you get to the one you want, and then click on it. In this example, I want to create an internal link to a page on Free-writing techniques, so I just move through the list until I find it, I click on it, and then I click on Apply.
If you want to create a link to an external page, select the text you want and then click on the Insert link icon. Then, type in the URL that you want the selected text to link to:
Then, click on Apply.