The ruler is displayed at the top of the main window. It allows
you to change the justification, line spacing, tab positions, and
margins of the text. The changes apply to the currently selected
paragraph, or can be applied to larger areas by selecting the
appropriate text. You can hide or show the ruler via the Text >
Show Ruler
menu command, and change whether or not it appears by
default in new documents via the preferences.
These buttons on the ruler control the justification of the selected text. Click to make the text left, middle, fully justified, or right justified, respectively.
This popup menu controls the line spacing. It offers two default
entries: Single
and Double
which allow you to easily
change the line spacing in the currently selected text. If you need
more precise and detailed settings, click on Other
. A sheet
will then offer all available parameters for line spacing adjustment.
This is a tab well. You can drag the left-most item in this box to the ruler (where the others are) to add a tab-stop. You can also drag the existing tab-stops around to adjust the tab positions, or drag them out to remove them. The three dimmed tab markers are not currently available.
This control on the left of the ruler, and the similar-looking one on the right, control the left and right margins of the page. Drag them to make the page narrower or wider, within the available space. With this left one, you can drag the triangle part to adjust the left margin for the first line of a paragraph, and drag the top rectangular part to adjust the left margin for the subsequent lines of a paragraph. This is useful to have automatic indenting of the first line for a book paragraph style, or to indent the subsequent lines in a list.
