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One of the most important aspects of web design is your content. The text that you use tells your visitor a lot about your website, your company and its company culture. The way you present your site’s text itself also acts to visually reinforce these characteristics.

There are many ways in which you can style your text in EverWeb, from the simple TextBox to widgets that use the Styled Text Editor to EverWeb’s own blogging environment. Then there is also the Text Inspector which allows you even more styling options for your text.

Why Use the Fonts Panel?

All of the above features allow you to style text and some of these features offer unique properties, such as indented quotes in blog posts, or Text Direction in the Styled Text Editor. There is, however, always one tool that is always available to you at all times: The Fonts Panel.

In addition to its availability being ubiquitous in EverWeb, the other big advantage of the Fonts Panel is that it has the most amount of text styling features that you can find in one place. That is a valuable asset to your workflow when building your website! Save time and effort by doing most of your Text Styling in one place rather than having to flip from, for example, the Text Inspector to the Shape Options tab to Color Picker

Accessing The Fonts Panel

Accessing the Fonts Panel is easy. Click on the Fonts button in EverWeb’s Toolbar. To make things even easier, though, just press the Font Panel’s Command+T shortcut key instead. This will toggle the Fonts Panel on and of at the touch of a button.

You can access the Fonts Panel at any time. You do not have to have any text selected either, so the Fonts Panel can always be sitting there, ready for when you need it. If there is ever a time where you know you have called up the Fonts Panel but cannot find amongst the windows on your desktop, just go to EverWeb’s Window menu. At the bottom of the menu select ‘Fonts’ from the bottom of the list. The Fonts Panel will come to the foreground.

Working with the Fonts Panel

The Fonts Panel dialog box has most of the options that you will ever need to style your text. Choose your text font from the Font Family column, the font weight from the Typeface column and the font size in the Size column. To get exactly the right font size that you want, overtype the number that is highlighted under the word ‘Size’.

Why Use Collections?

You can also collect fonts in the Fonts Panel together in to a Collection, which you can then access from the column on the left hand side of the Fonts Panel. This is useful if you want to have certain fonts and typefaces easily available for your EverWeb website Project. You may, for example, want to have a specific Font Family and Typeface for your page’s title, subheadings, footnotes and so on. Grouping Fonts Family and Typefaces in one Collection gives you a quick, easy solution that will save you time and effort.

Adding A Collection to the Fonts Panel

To create a Collection

1. Click on the ‘+’ symbol in the bottom left hand corner of the Fonts Panel.
2. A new collection called ‘New-xx’ will be created where xx is a sequential number e.g. New-11. Double click on the new Collection name and rename it e.g. with your project file name.
3. Next click on the ‘AllFonts’ collection which is at the top of the Collections column. All the fonts on your system will now be listed.
4. Select a Font Family, and Font Typeface that you want to add to your new Collection e.g. Helvetica, Bold. Use the Search box to quickly find the Font Family if you need to.
5. Your Font Family, Font Typeface should be highlighted in their respective columns.
6. Next, click on the Settings Cog in the bottom left hand corner of the Fonts Panel.
7. Choose ‘Add to Collection’ then click on the name of your collection from the list. The font will be added to your collection.
8. Repeat the process for all the specific fonts styles that you use in your Project file.

You have now added specific Fonts Families and Font Typefaces to your collection. You can now apply these to your text selections. Once you have applied the font family and typeface from the collection, the only thing you will need to do manually is to select the font Size.

Alternatively, you could set up one Collection per Font Family/Typeface to represent your project files page titles, Subheadings etc. For example, you could create a Collection called ‘Title’ that has just a Helvetica Bold font in it. Another Collection, ‘SubTitle’, could have just one item in it e.g. a Helvetica Light Oblique and so on…

Adding a Default Body Text Style

As you may already know, you can set up a default base font family, font style and size in EverWeb so you do not need to add this in to your own Collection.

Use the Format-> Default Styles… menu option. When you click on the Body Text font, the Fonts Panel will appear if it is not already visible on screen, Change the Font Fa mily, Typeface and Size to the new default that you want. If you want to change the font color default, use the specific option ‘Body Text Color’ in the Default Settings dialog box and not the color swatch in the Fonts Panel.

When you have finished, remember to click on ‘Save’ to apply your changes. Any new TextBox, new widget that you add that uses the Styled Text Editor, or new blog post that you create will adopt the new default settings.

Other Uses of the Fonts Panel

One of the useful features of the Fonts Panel and its Collections is that you can immediately see which fonts are web safe. If you have downloaded Google Fonts, you will also immediately which Font Typefaces the font has.

The Fonts Panel is where you can apply other formatting features, such as Strikethrough, to your text. There is also an option for text shadowing so that you do not have to go to the Shape Options tab to achieve the effect that you want. With the Fonts Panel, it is all on one place.

Once you have finished styling your text using the Fonts Panel, just press Command+T to toggle for the dialog box to disappear!