May/June 1997

Grab attention with text design

When you want to grab the reader's attention, most people think of using photographs or clip art. But text design is another important element for making the printed page more inviting. The February/March article, "How to get your message across with black and white," covered reversed text and shading. This article will give you four more techniques.

Drop Caps

Drop caps are an easy, elegant way to draw the reader's eye to the beginning of an article or sections within an article. To insert a drop cap in WordPerfect, put the insertion point anywhere in the paragraph where you want the drop cap to appear. Choose Format > Paragraph > Drop Cap. Select your style from the dialog box.

Now you can customize the drop cap — which is what I have done for my style within this newsletter. You can raise the letter above the paragraph, change font, add a border, etc. You can even use the first word as a "drop cap." Place your insertion point (cursor) before the drop cap and the Drop Cap Toolbar will appear.

Rotated Text

Headlines and titles don't always have to be at the top of the document. You can call attention to a flier, newsletter, or press release by rotating the text. But be aware that rotated text can be hard to read, so use only a few words and keep the font size as large as possible.

To create a vertical title, choose Insert > Text Box. Center the text within the box. Then edit the box to make the following changes:

• rotate the text by choosing Content, then rotate 90 Degrees. You may also need to change the Horizontal Position.
• remove the borders under the Borders/Fills option
• change the Position to "Attach box to: Page" and change the horizontal placement as needed
• change the Size to fit your needs, be sure to leave enough white space between the title and the regular text.

TextArt

Use TextArt (under the Insert > Graphics menu) to quickly shape your text into graphics designs. You have over 50 shapes to select from, including waves, pennants, circles, crescents, or bow ties. You can also vary the font style, color, fill, and shadow effects. Use these sparingly, you can quickly create something that is very hard to read.

The Information title in the masthead on the front page and the first "drop cap" are TextArt images. Once you create the TextArt image, it resides inside a graphics box so you can also make changes to the box settings — position, size, wrap, etc.

Bullets and Special Characters

Bullets and other special characters call attention to and emphasize a list of items, such as the two styles of list in the first article of this newsletter. Bulleted lists are easier to read than items placed in a paragraph.

You can find the standard bullets in WordPerfect under Insert > Outline/Bullets & Numbers... The special characters are under Insert > Symbol... (Ctrl+W for a shortcut). You will find some interesting characters in the Iconic Symbols set. The numbers I used in the first article are from that set.

One great feature of the special characters is that WordPerfect treats them like text. You can increase or decrease the size simply by selecting the character and changing the font size. Make the character large enough and it looks like clip art. You can also apply the Drop Cap feature to characters — which is what I did to the numbers in the first article.

Special software fonts (TrueType fonts, marked with TT in the font list) can give you even more special characters. One common font that usually comes with Windows is Wingdings. If you have the Wingdings font, you can use its characters by selecting the font, then use the Character Set 12, "User Defined" in the WordPerfect Characters dialog box. You will not see the characters in the box, so you will need to work from a printout of the characters and enter the number for the desired character. For example, press Ctrl+W, then enter 12,58 and you will see a computer character in your document.

~ Pamela Peters

CIT Information is published by Communications and Information Technology - Computing section, Institute of Agriculture and Natural Resources, University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Newsletter articles may be copied and distributed for nonprofit, educational purposes only and the source must be acknowledged. Direct all correspondence to the editor, Pamela K. Peters (E-mail: pkpeters@unlnotes.unl.edu; Phone: 402/472-5630; FAX: 402/472-5639).

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