Colors and Fonts

Fonts Palette

To start messing around with fonts choose the menu item Format ▸ Font ▸ Show Fonts

The Fonts Palette packs a lot of punch for being so small. This little window controls everything that you could want to do with font. If you get confused about which button does what, hold your mouse over it for a second and it will display a tooltip about what its function is.

There are Collections of fonts (like folders in the finder), inside which are font Families, inside which are Typefaces. An example of this in the real world would be All Fonts ▸ American Typewriter ▸ Bold. Collections can be handy if you find yourself often using the same few fonts. You can create your own collections, or use the ones Apple has provided. The Fun collection includes some excellent fonts for parties and cards. If you would like to add a font to the collection, simply drag it in. Adding a deleting collections is controlled by the plus and minus buttons below the collections.

If you find yourself unable to find a font you know is on your computer, make sure you're selected on the All Fonts collection.
Size is controlled by the slider, list and box to the right of the window. You can enter in a value into the upper box, find a commonly used size in the list, or move the slider until you're happy.

There is also a search field at the bottom of the window. If you find that scrolling through all of your fonts takes longer than you want, simply type the name of the font into the search field and it will instantly pop up in the Family column.

Things like shadow, underline, color, and strikethrough are controlled by the buttons on the top of the window, as well as from the Format ▸ Font menu.

Feel free to play with these properties if you're not familiar with them. In particular, with some text selected, choose Underline. Notice that rather than underlining the text, VoodooPad instead displays this panel:



The reason for this preference is that VoodooPad uses both underlining and text color to indicate links. It can be difficult to determine which underlined words really represent links if non-link words and phrases are also underlined and/or colored. This can be changed, but don't let underlining trick you if you do.

You might also want to try Format ▸ Font ▸ Show Highlight Colors instead. With a little bit of text selected, changing the color here will highlight that text.

Colors Palette

The Colors Palette lets you pick, sample and store colors in a variety of ways. Generally the Color Palette will pop up just when you need it, but If you're having trouble finding it, you can pull it up if you go Format ▸ Font ▸ Show Colors or by typing (shift command C).

Along the top of the window are different ways to pick colors, there are wheels, sliders, spectrums, and crayons to pick from. Messing around with the sliders is one way to get results. If you have a picture with the color you want in your document, click on the magnifying glass, put the crosshairs anywhere on the screen, and click once. This will set the new color to the one you just sampled.



When you've picked a color, it will show up in the big bar next to the magnifying glass. The current color in the image above is set to a nice mellow orange.

These colors can also be stored by dragging the color from that same big bar down onto the little grid below. Keeping a swatch library can save you time later if you consistently use the same colors in everything. Any color swatch that you drag down into this section can be accessed from most other applications on your mac. If you have a green you use on all of your stationary, you can store it and use it in VoodooPad, Keynote, Pages, Mail, iWeb, etc.

If you're looking to go further with the Color Palette, check out Waffle Software∞ as well as Lithoglyph∞ for awesome adds ons to help you pick the best colors. There are also some online color pickers designed to help you get amazing matching color palettes. Try checking out Adobe's Kuler∞.

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