The Format menu

Fonts, Styles, Alignment, Rulers

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.

Font: Access fonts, change type sizes, and copy/paste the style of selected text.

• Show Fonts: Opens the macOS Font panel.
• Bigger/Smaller: Increase or decrease the size of selected rich text by 1pt.
• 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: Control the formatting of selected rich text and also some higher-end font control like kerning and baseline shift.

• Bold/Italic/Underline/Strike Through/Outline: Apply the chosen formatting to selected rich text.
• 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).
• Kern: Modify the spacing between characters.
• Ligature: Choose whether to use conjoined characters, called ligatures, e.g., fi. This only works with fonts having built-in ligatures, typically classic serif fonts like Baskerville.
• Baseline: Shifts the selected text above or below the baseline, including sub- and superscripting.
• Character Shape: Traditional Form Dynamically shifts from Simplified to Traditional Chinese characters.

Alignment: Set the paragraph alignment: Align Left, Center, Justify, or Align Right. You can also set the Writing Direction for the current paragraph or selected text, 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.

Make Plain/Rich Text: Converts a rich text document to plain text and vice versa.

Highlights

Highlight: 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.

Highlight Color: Choose the desired highlight color. While highlighting, this remains the color used until you choose another.

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: Inserts a list into a text document. Specify the Prefix, Bullet/Number style, suffix, and Starting Number as needed then click OK. As an example with the first three options, Document, 1 2 3, and :, yields a list item of Document 1:.The Prepend enclosing list marker is used with nested lists and adds the prefix of the parent list to the sublist items. If the lists are using 1., the sublist would show 1.1..

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.

Hyphenation, Layout

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.

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.

Typewriter-like Scrolling: Keeps the currently edited line in the center of the window or view/edit pane.

Wiki Linking: Toggles whether to display WikiLinks in the current document.

WYSIWYG Editing: Toggles the WYSIWYG view when editing Markdown documents.

Bars, Colors, Invisible Characters

Show Format Bar: Displays the Format Bar under the toolbar, providing access to rich text styles, font and paragraph attributes, etc.

Show Editing Bar: Displays the Editing Bar above the view/edit pane containing a suite of format-specific tools. For example, rich text formats display several common tools including highlighting, toggling the ruler, and displaying the color picker are shown. For sheets, tools to add/remove/duplicate records, as well as the column editor.

Show Colors: Shows the macOS 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.