Home | Appendix

Quick links: |  | Fonts, Styles, Alignment, Rulers Highlights Links, Spacing, Lists, Tables Plain & Rich Text, Hyphenation, Layout Bars, Colors, Invisible Characters

|  |  | The Format menu

The Format menu contains the commands and options dealing with all aspects of text formatting. Here you'll find the standard font, alignment, and ruler commands, as well as very special DEVONthink commands.
Note: Many commands in this menu only work with rich text, Markdown, or formatted notes. Plain text documents do not allow formatting. (That's why they're called "plain" text.) Some formatting options are also available for editable PDFs and web archives.
Fonts, Styles, Alignment, Rulers Font: This submenu is responsible for controlling the font and the document background color (rich text documents only). Open the fonts panel with Show Fonts, then increase or decrease the font size of selected text with Bigger and Smaller, adjust the text styles and the document background color. Of special note are these two submenu commands: Copy Font: Copies the font formatting of a selected piece of rich text. Paste Font: After using the previous command, applies the copied font to another selection of rich text. Style: Commands in this submenu apply a certain style, such as italics, bold, or underlined, to selected text. Also, the commands give you access to some high-end font control like kerning, baseline shift, ligatures, and character shape (only applicable to Asian languages). One command to take special note of: Styles: The Styles command opens the macOS styles editor. With it, you can step through all the styles used in the current document. If there's one you'd like to reuse, add them to your favorites. Use the pop-up menu to select a saved style and, if you don't need it any more, delete it. You can use saved styles from the ruler (see below). Alignment: Align paragraphs left, right, centered, or justified. Here, Asian or Arabic users can also change the direction of writing, if required. Ruler: This submenu allows you to display the ruler above the preview of rich text documents. There are also two special commands: Copy Ruler: Copies the current ruler attributes (tabs stops, indents, etc.) of a selected piece of rich text. Paste Ruler: After using the previous command, applies the copied ruler attributes to another selection of rich text. Highlights Highlight, Highlight Color: In rich text documents, editable PDFs, and web archives use Highlight to highlight a selected piece of text just as you would using with a colored pen on a piece of paper. To remove highlighting, select the highlighted piece of text and choose Highlight again. Use the Highlight Color submenu to choose your favorite highlight color. Links, Spacing, Lists, Tables Make/Remove Link: Converts the selected text into an active link, or disables the link. This command can be used to create WikiLinks quickly. Add/Edit Link: Use this command if you want to add a specific link to some text. If the text is already linked, the menu will display Edit Link, allowing you to change or remove the URL. The behavior you'll see when clicking linked text depends on the target of the link: If the text was a valid URL, the URL will be the target of the link. Editing the link text later does not change the target. Use the Edit Link command of the context menu to edit the link target. Otherwise, DEVONthink treats the link as a Wiki-style link. Clicking the Wiki-style link jumps to a document with exactly the same name as the linked text (or any document with a Wiki alias of that name). If there is no document of that name, clicking the link creates a new rich text document named after the linked text and pre-filled by the template you set in the Settings > Editing. Spacing: This command allows you to adjust the line spacing of selected text in rich text documents. You can adjust the line height to an exact value or define a minimum and maximum height, adjust inter-line spacing, and define the space before and after a paragraph. List: Creates a bulleted list. Select your prefix, bullet style, and suffix in the dialog sheet and click OK to insert a new list. In the list, press ↩ Return to insert new items, and press ⇥ Tab and ⇧⇥ Shift-Tab to indent/de-indent items, just as you would in any word processor. Table: Inserts a new table into a rich text document and opens the table inspector panel. Use the table inspector to adjust the number of rows and columns, cell alignments, cell colors, border widths, and colors. Also, you can merge and split cells and create tables within a cell. Plain & Rich Text, Hyphenation, Layout Make Plain/Rich Text: Converts a rich text document to plain text and vice versa. Converting a rich text to plain text removes all formatting, while converting a plain text document to rich text applies default rich text font settings to the document. Allow Hyphenation: Enables or disables hyphenation for the current rich text document. Make Layout Vertical/Horizontal: Enables orienting and editing the document text vertically or horizontally. Wiki Linking: Toggles whether to display WikiLinks in the current document. Wrap Lines: Toggle whether to wrap a document's content to the width of the view/edit pane or document window, or let it exceed the width for sideways scrolling. Bars, Colors, Invisible Characters Show Formatting Bar: Displays a toolbar of formatting tools under the toolbar, providing access to styles, font and paragraph attributes, and lists. These tools are only used with RTF files. Show Editing Bar: Displays tools above the current preview pane for some file types. For example, rich text formats display several common tools including increasing/decreasing font size, highlighting, toggling the ruler, and displaying the color picker are shown. For sheets, tools to add/remove/duplicate records, as well as editing columns are shown. Show Colors: Shows the color panel, e.g., for changing the foreground color of selected text in rich text documents. Show Invisible Characters: Toggles display of invisible characters such as spaces, tabs, and line feeds. Shown invisible characters appear in light gray.