Text Body

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Now at last we can talk about the Text Body, the actual content, the real substance of any lengthy document. Like all other elements, the text body has its own specific paragraph style, appropriately named Text body, containing a whole plethora of settings (see illustration 14).

Wfs may2014 014 parastyle TextBody.png

Illustration 13. Paragraph style "Text Body" for main text

Any paragraph can be made into Text body by placing the cursor in it and pressing Ctrl + 0. Right clicking such a paragraph offers you the option Edit paragraph style… which in turn brings up a pop-up menu where you can make a number of adjustments (illustration 13).

By default Text body allows for a Spacing below paragraph of 0,21mm, which is exactly 6pt – which in turn is exactly half the hight of a standard 12pt font. This very modest spacing is nevertheless enough to highlight the start of a new paragraph, thus speading up reading.*

A typical setting for your body text in a university environment might well be Line spacing of 1.5 lines, i.e. 150%. But from an optical point of view a Proportional Line Spacing of 120% should do. Also you will probably want your text to be justified, meaning that it be aligned to both left and right margins – unlike headings or a poem, which you would want to be left aligned with ragged margins.

In case you choose Alignment justified, then you will also need to activate automatic hyphenation: Text flow › Hyphenation › Automatically. Automatic hyphenation is important in order to avoid large gaps in case a long word doesn’t fit at the end of the line and moves on to the next line so that the remaining words sprawl right up to the right margin. However, in order to avoid too many hyphenations you can augment the Characters at end of line and also Characters at beginning of line from 2 to 3. This way short words such as “impact” won’t get split.

Under the tab Text flow you should activate Orphan control and Widow control. The former avoids a solitary line at the bottom of a page. It will automatically move on to the next page to join the rest of the paragraph. The latter avoids a lonely line at the very top of a page. It will automatically "pull" the last line from the previous page.

Template:Documentation/Note


* Another alternative – one often used in books – is instead to indent the first line by say 3mm. But then you would need an extra paragraph style for those paragraphs immediately following a heading, which don’t need any indentation.




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