1.2.4. Text halos

When the cursor is inserted in a text frame, the text halos appear above and to the right of the current cursor position. They look like this:

From left to right, the halos that appear are the character halo, the text link halo, and the paragraph halo. These three halos will move with the cursor as text is typed or the cursor position is moved. Below and to the right of a text frame appears another halo that is used when dealing with text, the chain halo.

The character HUD

The character halo can be clicked on to reveal the character HUD, which looks like this:

This HUD allows you to change the font, size, and font settings for the currently selected text, or for text typed immediately after the HUD is closed. The two color squares allow you to set the color of the text (the left square) or the color of the background for the text (the right square). Note that the default opacity for text background is 0; set this to some higher value if you want a background to appear.

The paragraph HUD

The paragraph halo can be clicked on to reveal the paragraph HUD, which looks like this:

This HUD allows you to set paragraph-level settings for the entire paragraph in which the cursor is currently inserted. (If more than one paragraph is currently selected, in whole or in part, those paragraphs will also be affected by changes made to this HUD). The top control sets the paragraph alignment, which can be left, centered, right, or fully justified; the default is left-justified. The other controls let you select left indent, right indent, space below the paragraph, space above the paragraph, and the linespacing. All of these values are in points. The linespacing value is the extra number of points added between the lines in the paragraph.

The text link HUD

The text link halo can be clicked on to reveal the text link HUD, which looks like this:

This link HUD works just like the frame link HUD; to learn how that works, go here. The text link differs from the page link HUD and the frame link HUD in that it has a bottom section, which allows you to set the color of the text link. Click on the color square to set the link color. Currently the link color appears as a background to the link text; in the future, this will be modified.

The chain HUD

Clicking on the chain halo at the bottom right corner of the frame will open the chain HUD, which looks like this:

The drop-down menu will allow you to select any frame on the page; when a frame is chained to another frame, text flows from the first frame to the second frame when there's no more room in the first frame. (In coming releases of Sophie, you'll be able to chain text frames that are on different pages; for now, this functionality is limited to frames on the same page.) If the Autochain button is pressed, the frame is autochained: this means that new pages will be created when the frame is full of text. These new pages will contain the text in a frame identical to the first frame.

When a frame is chained to another frame, the chain halo turns into the unchain halo:

When this halo is clicked, the frame is unchained from the frame it was chained to; the chain HUD can be used to select another frame to chain.

To learn more about chaining text, go here.