Formatting text
Although you can use the same font face, size and color throughout the report, text is much more attractive when headings are more prominent, subparagraphs are indented, etc.
Plain text and rich text
You can add text colors, font faces, sizes and styles such as boldface, and the report is regarded as being in Rich Text Format (RTF). RTF reports can be converted to plain text easily if desired:
Examples:
- This paragraph uses PLAIN TEXT alone. All text is the same font face, style, size and color. Boldfacing, italics, underlining, etc. are not used; changing from lower case to UPPER CASE is the only way to make text more prominent.
- This paragraph uses Rich Text, which allows many more formatting attributes such as color to be incorporated. Adding color and images automatically changes the format from plain text to rich text, since both hide extra code in the report.
Report Writer regards its reports as being in rich text format, but you can mix these within a file. Who would want to use plain text when rich text has so much more to offer? Here are two good reasons:
- Plain text reports makes the ezScriptWriter database much smaller, since there are no hidden formatting characters. This can make quite a difference when you have thousands of reports.
- You are not faced with the extra chore of reformatting to match the format of the rest of the report text if you copy and paste in plain text.
Note also that plain text reports cannot contain images, underlined hyperlinks, tables, boldfaced or other types of formatting. Converting a rich text report to plain text removes images and table cell borders but leaves the text itself.
Basic formatting commands
Let's concentrate now on rich text. You will find the most frequently used commands (bold, italic, underline, case conversion, font face/size/color/highlight color, etc.) displayed along the Report formatting toolbar. Let your mouse cursor hover over each toolbutton in turn to display a tooltip (text popup message) informing you of its function and keyboard shortcut, if there is one. Try them out.