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About Paragraph Formatting

You can affect the look and behavior of paragraphs in various ways. These settings can be applied locally or to the style used for the paragraph. Modifying the style is typically preferable to changing the settings locally for a single paragraph.

Following are some of the more common ways that you can format paragraphs.

ClosedWays to Format Paragraphs
  • Alignment You can format a paragraph so that the text is aligned right, left, centered, or justified. 
  • Autonumbering You can apply an autonumber format to paragraphs so that certain content and/or incremented numbering displays with it. This is useful for numbering elements such as chapters, figures, or tables.
  • Background You can set a background color and/or image on a paragraph. 
  • Borders You can add borders around a paragraph. Borders can be added on any side of a paragraph (left, right, top, bottom), or all around it. 
  • Breaks For print-based output, you can apply a page or column break to a paragraph or heading (either via styles or local formatting). For example, you might do this if you want the paragraph or heading to start at the beginning of the next page or column. Alternatively, you can insert a page break on a line by itself, independent of any HTML element. You might apply a frame break if you want to make sure that only certain text, such as a heading, appears in a certain body frame in a page layout. 
  • Hyphenation You can specify whether words at the end of a line in a paragraph should be hyphenated before continuing to the next line. You can also determine minimum word and character settings to be used for hyphenation. 
  • Indentation You can indent paragraphs so that they start or end at a certain distance from the left or right side of the page frame, whether that means the entire paragraph or just the first line (like a traditional "tab"). 
  • Line Spacing You can specify the amount of spacing between lines in a paragraph. 
  • Short Line Elimination You can use this feature to automatically adjust word spacing if the last line of a paragraph is only a certain number of characters long. Therefore, the spacing may be widened to make the last line longer, or the spacing may be narrowed to bring the words in the last line up to the previous line. 
  • Spacing Above/Below You can set the amount of spacing above and below paragraphs. 
  • Widow and Orphan Control You can use widow and orphan control to avoid instances where "leftover" lines from a paragraph are shown at the top or bottom of a page or column.