BarIfxFormatFont The Font button is an InstaButton, so it follows the principles of operation of all InstaButtons.

The Font dropdown dialog is depicted below. To open it, click on the little "down" arrow at the right edge of a Font button.

 

Let's examine its items. As you may have guessed, the combo boxes at the top are Font Name and Character Set. Character Sets (or Charsets) are described in a separate chapter dealing with International Issues. Below, we find a dense line of controls that are left-to-right: Font Size, Bold, Italic, Underline, Strikeout, Text Color, Background Color. These are followed by 3 boxes whose meaning would be enigmatic otherwise, so they are labeled: Vertical Shift, Character Scale, Character Spacing.

Vertical Shift is measured in % and it shifts text up or down (depending on the sign of the value) from the normal baseline. Alventis does not directly support superscript or subscript font styles, but you can emulate both using appropriate Vertical Shift values, perhaps also reducing the Font Size of the sub- or superscript.

Character Scale is also measured in % and it expands or contracts the entire selected text by the value specified.

Character Spacing is measured in pixels and is responsible for expanding or contracting only the spaces between characters – not the characters themselves.

 

 

InstaButtonsFont1D

 

That's it. Well, almost. There are also these two little buttons to the right of the Font Name and Character Set combo boxes. These are radio buttons: pressing one un-presses the other. Each of them, when pressed, indicates that its adjacent combo box takes priority over the other one. Here's how it works. Let's say you know which specific font you want to select by name. Be it Arial or Wingdings, you know the name you want. Make sure the Priority button next to the Font Name combo box is pressed. This fills the Font combo box with names of all fonts available on your machine. You can now select whichever font you want by name. Let's take another example though. Imagine you know the Charset you want to use, e.g., Greek. If you want to type something in Greek, Charset certainly takes priority: you want your text come out with proper characters, and what specific typeface (font name) they belong to is secondary. If you were using the first setup where Font Name had priority, you'd have to either know or guess the name of a font that supports the Greek Charset (many do, but not all). Failing that, you'd have to go through them one-by-one in search of the right one. Not so with our dialog. Just click on the Priority button next to the Charset combo box. Now it is this combo box that is filled with all Character Sets available on your computer. Pick the one you like – and the Font Name combo box will only display the names of fonts that were determined to support your chosen Charset.

You may not have too much need for this feature if you are not in a habit of typing multilingual text. But you may also find it useful if you are trying to go through, say, a list of fonts that support the Symbol Charset.

 

In closing, we'd like to note that whenever one of these combo boxes ends up containing a single item (be it Font or Charset), it becomes disabled as an indication to you that there's no choice available.