Information and Communication Technology

Transcription

1 Module 1 Lesson 3 (ICT7A3) Information and Communication Technology Module 1 Word Processing 1 Lesson 3: Fonts Tutor: Mr. M. Warburton Introduction I assume you know how to use the mouse to highlight a section of text so that you can change characteristics like size, font, style and colour. Use the mouse to move the pointer to the beginning of the word you want to highlight. Press the left mouse button and hold it while you drag the pointer to the end of the word, phrase, sentence or paragraph. You can t change these things unless the text is highlighted. If you don t highlight the text but change these characteristics they will only apply to new things that you type from that point onwards. Objectives Let s move on with the next part of word processing. By the end of this lesson, you should be able to: Change the font and size of text. Embolden, italicise and underline text as you enter it. Align text to the left or right margin. Centre text (eg for titles). Highlight text. Change the character of text. Apply a style. Setting a format Let s start by examining the formatting tools a little more. Below is a picture of the whole <Home> ribbon. There are 3 main things we are going to look at this lesson: <Fonts> <Paragraphs>. and (briefly) the <Style> sections. Page 1 of 9 - MSW 2013

2 Fonts I ve mentioned the word fonts a few times you ve probably understood what I m talking about. The official definitions can be quite hard to understand. The one I like best is: A character set (alphabet and numerals) of a specified design and size. Now here s an example of a different font in the box above with the definition. I copied that definition straight off the Google web page and it is in a font called Lucinda Grand. A font is a particular design of the typeface you are using. Modern computers and software usually come with many different fonts to use. It would take too long for me to try and count the number of fonts available with my latest copy of Microsoft Word 2013 I would think it must be over 100! A brief history diversion! It is generally said that Johannes Gutenberg invented letter printing in Germany around In fact there had been other ways to print things in other cultures long before this and other people in Europe had also been working on ways to print letters and books around this time. His main idea was to make metal letter shapes that could be mounted in a special frame so they couldn t move around. This frame was then dipped in special ink and pressed on to paper. This made it possible to start mass-producing books quite cheaply. It is usually quoted that Gutenberg printed the whole Bible in William Caxton brought this idea to England and set up the first printing press in More recent versions of these frames are shown in the picture to the right. Gutenberg found that by designing the letter shapes with tiny triangles at the ends of all straight lines, the frame could be lifted off the paper without smudging. These little triangles are called serifs and are the basis of a whole family of fonts. These families are usually called serif-fonts or Roman fonts. It is most common to use serif fonts for ordinary text. I am still using Times or Times New Roman for this lesson. These were usually the default fonts on many computers and software. Cambria is a serif font that is a standard font in Microsoft OfEice since 2007 this is Cambria font. Hard to tell the difference, isn t it? It uses slightly wider spacing for the letters so it s a bit clearer and easier to read. Page 2 of 9

3 Sans-serif fonts are another family of fonts. They were developed in the 1920s when printing presses were much better and could print letters without smudging the ends of straight lines ( sans = without in French). Sans-serif fonts are more common as headings and for big letters. Arial is a common sans-serif font, which is what I have used for this paragraph. Calibri in the common Microso- Office sans- serif font like this. It s slightly smaller than Arial in the paragraph above. The other thing to notice is the spacing of the letters. Letterpress printing usually uses variable-width letters. Obviously the letter i takes up less width than the letter m. A page of text in a letterpress printer is assembled using individual letters. The job of putting these letters into the frame was the work of a compositor. He had trays of each letter and made up words and sentences, then paragraphs and pages by choosing separate letters and spaces and locking them into a frame ready to print. When typewriters were invented in the 1860s they used the same fonts as letterpress, but mounted one copy of each letter on an arm that swung forward when you pressed a key. It hit an inked ribbon and made a mark on the paper. But you then had to move the paper ready for the next letter. This had to be done mechanically so every letter had to use the same amount of space. So typewriter fonts are often called the monospace font-family. Courier is a common example like this. Modern fonts come in all sorts of different shapes. Some are very funky Bauhaus 93, Some look like handwriting Brush Sctipt. Ones to note if you are writing for young children and those that use open a more like handwriting and not like the normal printers a Chalkboard is an example. Comic Sans is another popular font with open a s. Hard to tell the difference isn t it? Open one of the documents you used last lesson. Highlight at least one paragraph and try out some of the fonts you ve got on your computer. Use the Font drop-down arrow to select different fonts. Fonts you are used recently are sometimes at the top of the list to make them easy to find again. Page 3 of 9

4 Size While you are experimenting, try using different font sizes. Use the drop-down arrow by the numbers. Fonts are usually measured in points. It goes back to letterpress printing, but I won t bore you with more history! Computer fonts are usually defined in units called points. There are basically 72 points to an inch. That doesn t convert to metric very well, but 12-point is a fairly standard easy to read size. Anything less than 12-point is quite small, but 11-point and 10-point are quite readable by most people. Once you get below 8-point it is really getting rather small and hard to read. Most of this lesson is written in 14-point, so it s a little bit larger than average. Here are some samples: 12-point standard text 11-point a bit smaller but still OK to read 10-point about the smallest font you would use for any quantity of writing 9-point getting hard to read 8-point the smallest you would normally want to use 6-point really too small to read without a magnifying glass!! Now the larger sizes: 16-point 18-point good for titles 24-point important headings only Anything larger is really only for display purposes. To leave room between the lines of type you need a bit of space between them. This is called the leading. It is usually about 25% of the font size. So 12-point font will usually have at least 3 points between the rows. This is useful with proportional fonts because some letters drop below the normal line g j p q y. They are in old imperial measurements because they were invented years ago, long before the French Revolution brought the metric system of measurements into use! But of course, the U.S.A. is the only industrialised nation that still uses the imperial system of measurements and much software and computer development comes out of America! Font Style or Text Style This is not to be confused with Formatting Styles that I ll mention briefly later in the lesson. I ve already mentioned font styles last lesson. There are three basic text styles available with most word-processors: Page 4 of 9

5 Bold text Italic text Underlined text There are buttons on the <Home/Font> ribbon to use them. You would normally only use these styles to emphasise odd words or phrases like I have done, or as headings. There will be some practice in a practice assignment for this lesson. Colour There are a whole range of colours available for your text. As I said last lesson, you need to consider your audience, your purpose and the impact you want to create. Just using colour for the sake of it is not a good idea. There is a drop-down menu beside the text colour icon on the <Home/Font> ribbon. It will usually have a capital letter A with a line under it in the current text colour. A small down arrow next to it will reveal a basic colour palette. Microsoft now use a Theme for colours, so yours might not exactly match the picture shown Automatic is usually black. Underneath that come the 10 current theme colours, followed by 50 variations of shades of those colours. Next come 10 standard colours. If that s still not enough, the <More Colors > at the bottom will open a colour wheel with thousands of different shades. Finally, the <Gradient> option gives you all sorts of fancy effects with slight variations of shade across your text. Not only can you use coloured text, but you can also use coloured backgrounds. The Text Highlight Color icon is usually just to the left of the Font Color icon and the drop-down arrow will give you a selection of colours to choose. As with everything in this module, the best way to learn how to do things is to experiment with coloured text and highlights. You can use a copy of any text document and don t save it unless you particularly want to do so. Page 5 of 9

6 Font dialogue There are a number of other things you can do with fonts. In the bottom right-hand corner of the <Home/Fonts> ribbon is a small box with a diagonal arrow. Click on this to bring up the Font dialogue box shown right. There are many features you can use from here, but I don t want to discuss any of them in this lesson. Paragraph formatting Next, let s look at some ways you can change the way a whole paragraph (or more) of your document. Find <Home/Paragraph> ribbon. Alignment/Justification There are four different ways to line up your text. Some people call it justification but that s not strictly correct justification applies to one of the alignments see below. Align Left Center Align Right Justify (sometimes called fully justified ) These are the official names for them. You might find people talking about leftjustified or right-justified. I m sure you know what they mean: the left-hand side (or right-hand side) of your text is neatly lined up under each other. This is a valid use of the word justified although I prefer aligned as I have used above. However you cannot have centre-justified. Justified means that at least one end of the line is neatly lined up under the others. If you centre text it is pretty unlikely that the margins will be anywhere near neat! Like this paragraph. Centre-alignment is not really a very sensible option for paragraphs, but it s very good for headings and titles. If text is to be justified with no left or right it is assumed that you mean fully justified with both margins neat. Sorry this sounds very confusing, but I ve come across it wrong so many times with students work. This paragraph is fully justified. Extra spaces have been automatically inserted to fill up every line exactly between the left and the right margins. Many books are often fully justified; so are newspapers, although the narrow columns sometimes give strange effects! Page 6 of 9

7 Bullets and Numbering Two other text formatting techniques. I use bullet points in the Objectives part of each lesson and at other times. If you want to set out a list of things you can put bullet points or numbers beside them. If there is no particular importance in the order of the points you use bullets; if there is some significance in the order you would use numbering. If you know that you want to start using bullets while you are writing: Press Enter/Return Click on the Bullets icon and anything you type from now onwards will have a bullet point at the beginning of each line. When you next press the Enter/Return key, you will get a new bullet point. To stop using bullets, click the Bullets icon again. If you type your text first and then decide that you want to turn some of your text into bullet points: Highlight the text you want to change Click the bullets icon. If, instead of bullet points you want to make numbered paragraphs, you can do exactly the same by using the Numbering icon. Once you have selected bullets or numbering pressing Enter/Return will automatically start a new line with a new bullet point or the next number. You can also customise the bullets or numbers. If you right-click on a line with bullets or numbers you get a contextual menu to choose different shapes for the bullets or different numbering styles. Styles (Formatting styles) At the end of the <Home> ribbon is another use of the word Style. I started this lesson by talking about bold, underline, and italic as styles. This section is a bit different. You can set up certain styles that cover all the details of the way a piece of text looks the font, its size, bold/italic/underline, alignments, paragraph characteristics (see next lesson) and lots of other things. This can be very useful. I make use of it myself to be sure that all my lessons look alike. For example I use six basic styles (or style sheets) for my lessons: Page 7 of 9

8 Title for the main module title right at the beginning Subtitle for the lesson title in the line below the title Heading 1 for the section headings Heading 2 for less important sections Heading 3 (sometimes) for a further level of sub-headings Normal for (nearly) all the rest of the text. The description of my Normal style is Font: Times, 14pt, English(UK), Flush left, Line spacing single, Widow/orphan control. o Times is my Mac version of Times New Roman o 14pt is the text size o English(UK) is the spelling dictionary o Flush left is the alignment (left-hand side lined up neatly at the margin, but the right-hand side is left ragged). o Line spacing single see next lesson o Widow/orphan control means it adjusts my paragraphs at the end of pages to make sure there is not a single line on a different page to the rest of the paragraph. It s bad practice to make any paragraph split over 2 pages, sometimes it is necessary, but this ensures that it doesn t split off just one line on its own. Microsoft provide a large section of the <Home> ribbon for these styles. Here is a picture of the default settings on my laptop 1. To edit the styles and make them to be the way you want: Click on the diagonal arrow in a box in the bottom left-hand corner to brings up this dialogue box. - - à Click on the style you want to edit. A summary of it will appear and you can edit it by using the dropdown arrow. It s a bit too complicated for this level of work, but you can use the Font dialogue box to edit the font styles, size and colours. 2. To use the styles click on the one you want and start typing. Or highlight some text and then click on the style to apply it. Page 8 of 9

9 Practice Open the practice assignment that we did after the first lesson and updated last lesson by adding a header and footer the one about a vacuum cleaner causing the whole computer system to crash. Put your insertion point right at the beginning, before the first words, The company --- and type the following words (in capital letters) CLEAN ELECTRICITY! The press Enter/Return key twice so as to create a blank line between these words and the main body of text. Highlight the two words you have just typed; we will turn them into a title: a. Change the font. If your main body text is a serif font, choose a sans-serif font for these words or vice versa. b. Change the font size. If your main body of text is about 12-point, make these words about 18-point. c. Change the font style make them bold and italic. d. Change the alignment make it centred on the page by using the centre alignment icon. (Do not use the space bar!!! That s a very bad habit and can lead to problems with other formatting techniques.) e. Make the font a different colour try this make the font white (don t panic, you won t be able to see it, but leave it highlighted and do the next step f. Give the text a highlight colour either black or another dark colour of your choice. (N.B. If the white doesn t show up very well try changing it to some other light colour so that there is a contrast between the light type and a dark highlight background colour. Now highlight all the rest of the text and use the Justify icon to fully justify the text so that both margins are neat and every line starts/ends at exactly the same place. Save your work again maybe <File/Save As > with v3 on the end. Page 9 of 9