Formatting text — Nixt Writer docs

Character formatting changes how individual letters and words look. The controls are in the Font group on the Home tab.

To change whole paragraphs — alignment, spacing, lists, styles — see Paragraphs and styles.

How formatting is applied

With text selected, a formatting control changes the selected text.
With no text selected, the control sets the formatting for what you type next at the caret. Moving the caret somewhere else cancels it.

A button that is turned on for the text at the caret is highlighted. For a selection, Bold, Italic, Underline and Strikethrough are highlighted only when the whole selection has that formatting. Clicking a highlighted button turns the formatting off; clicking one that isn’t highlighted turns it on for the whole selection.

Font

Select the text.
Click the Font list on the Home tab.
Choose a font.

Fonts in the list
Calibri
Hanken Grotesk
Arial
Helvetica
Times New Roman
Georgia
Garamond
Courier New
JetBrains Mono
Verdana

The list shows the font of the text at the caret. If the text has no font of its own, it shows Calibri.

Bold, italic, underline and strikethrough

Formatting	Button	Shortcut
Bold	Bold	`⌘B` (`Ctrl+B` on Windows and Linux)
Italic	Italic	`⌘I` (`Ctrl+I` on Windows and Linux)
Underline	Underline	`⌘U` (`Ctrl+U` on Windows and Linux)
Strikethrough	Strikethrough	None

Underline applies a single underline. Documents from Word can have double, thick, dotted, dashed or wavy underlines; Writer keeps them in the file.

Text colour

Select the text.
Click Text colour (the letter icon with a colour bar under it).
Click a swatch, or click No colour to go back to the automatic colour.

The palette has 18 swatches in three rows: a row of greys from near-black to white, a row of six strong colours (indigo, blue, green, amber, red and plum), and a row of six pale tints. The bar under the button shows the colour at the caret.

Highlight

Select the text.
Click Highlight.
Click a swatch, or click No colour to remove the highlight.

The highlight palette is the same as the text colour palette. Writer saves a highlight as character shading, so it keeps the exact colour you picked; Word shows it as shading behind the text.

Clear formatting

Clear formatting removes all character formatting from the selected text — font, size, bold, italic, underline, strikethrough, colour and highlight — so the text looks the way its paragraph style says.

Select the text.
Click Clear formatting (the eraser), or press ⌘\ (Ctrl+\ on Windows and Linux).

Clear formatting needs a selection.

It doesn’t change the paragraph’s style, alignment, spacing or list. To reset a paragraph to its style, see Paragraphs and styles.

Formatting from Word documents

Writer shows and keeps more formatting than it has buttons for. Text from a Word document keeps these when you edit around it:

Formatting	On screen
Superscript and subscript	Drawn smaller, raised or lowered.
All caps	Drawn in capitals. The letters you typed are kept as they are.
Small caps	Kept in the file.
Character spacing	Drawn with the wider or narrower spacing.
Character shading	Drawn like a highlight.
Theme colours and fonts	Resolved through the document’s theme, including tints and shades. See Themes, page colour and watermarks.
Character styles, such as Strong	Applied when drawing the text.

Formatting and track changes

When track changes is on, a formatting change you make is recorded and signed with your name. On screen, the reformatted text gets a dotted amber underline. A reviewer can accept the change, or reject it to put the old formatting back. See Comments, track changes and compare.

Formatting in a restricted document

In a document restricted to read-only or comments only, the formatting controls don’t change the text. See Restricting editing.