Text

Finally, there are a number of properties that relate to the appearance and functionality of text in your documents. Not all of these properties will always be useful; however, these properties can be of vital importance if you are working with a non-Western language, or for gaining finer control over the flow of text within your documents.

Some of these text-related properties include

• country— This property allows you to specify the country code for the document being defined. The value of the country should be the recognized two-character country code.

• language— The language property allows you to control the language being used to render the document. This property will not directly affect the character encoding; however, it may affect how text is flowed within your document. For example, using a non-Western language such as Japanese or Arabic will cause text to be flowed in the appropriate direction for the language, rather than the top-to-bottom, left-to-right layout of English.

• hyphenate— This property allows you to turn hyphenation on or off.

• wrap-option— This property allows you to turn word wrapping on or off.

• text-align— This property determines how text is aligned within an object, such as a block. For example, text can be aligned left, right, or center.

• letter-spacing— This property allows you to specify the letter spacing used with a section of text.

• word-spacing— This property allows you to specify the word spacing used with a section of text.

• break-before and break-after— These two properties can be used to help keep areas of text (such as a block) together. You can choose to have the formatter insert page breaks before or after an object.

• orphans and widows— Orphans and widows are characters or lines of text that are separated significantly from the rest of their text—for example, the last sentence in a chapter that flows over onto a new page. These properties allow you to specify how much text is allowed to be orphaned or widowed before the processor will go back, and insert a page break and reflow the text in order to eliminate these stragglers.

Manipulation of these properties can allow you to produce vibrant, complete documents using a variety of character sets and languages, and to ensure that the text in your document appears exactly as you would like it to appear.