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Format and style text

Learn how to edit the style, size, font, and general appearance of your text in Coda

Updated over 3 months ago

Coda supports a variety of text formatting options to let you transform text as you’d like to add emphasis, style, or just for a little flair!

Coda offers a toolbar for text formatting, and supports most traditional keyboard shortcuts for formatting. You can review the full list of Coda keyboard shortcuts by typing /keyboard shortcuts anywhere in your doc.

Read on to learn how to apply various formatting options to your text.

Within this article you’ll find...


Access the text formatting toolbar

When typing in Coda — on the canvas, in a cell, or an expanded row modal — you can highlight text to select it, which will display the formatting toolbar right by the text you wish to edit. You can also access the toolbar at any time by pressing on a Mac or Ctrl on a PC.

Use the formatting toolbar to do any of the following:

  • Change your text to a heading size, list, quote style, callout, or code block. Learn more about the different paragraph styles available in this article.

  • Format your text in bold, italics, underline, strikethrough, and/or in-line code

  • Change the color of your text, or highlight it

  • Change the alignment of paragraph text to left, right, or center

  • Change the indent depth for lists

  • Add hyperlinks or comments

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Change text size

You can change font size in a few different ways, depending on whether you want to change the size for the entire page or just for a specific section of text on the page.

Change text size for the entire page

To change the font size for an entire page, follow these steps:

  1. Scroll to the top of the page, and click on Page options near the page title.

  2. In the panel that opens on the right, find the Font size section. Choose between Standard size (the default for pages) and Large.

If you choose Large, this will increase the font size for all text on the page, while still maintaining headers and other text formatting.

Change text size for a specific section

To change the font size for a specific section of text on a page, follow the steps below:

  1. Highlight the text you want to edit

  2. The text formatting bar should automatically open, but you can also re-open it any time by pressing on a Mac or Ctrl on a PC.

  3. The tile on the far left of the text toolbar will indicate the current text type. Click on this tile to open the other options.

  4. If you want to make the text larger, choose to convert the text to a H1, H2, or H3 header. If you want to convert an existing header to smaller text, click the T option to change it to plain text (the smallest text option).

change header size.gif

Change font type

Each page in a Coda doc can have one of two font types: Standard or Serif. To change the font type of a page, follow these steps:

  1. Scroll to the top of the page, and click on Page options near the page title.

  2. In the panel that opens on the right, find the Font section. Choose between Standard size (the default for pages) and Serif.

change page font type.gif

Note that there currently isn’t any way to change the font type for only certain sections of text on a page. This change will apply to all text on the page (except for text within tables).

Change text color

You can also change the color of text on the canvas, taking it beyond the standard black text on a white background. This allows you to add emphasis and vibrancy to your page. You can add color in one of two ways: change the color of the text itself, or add colored highlight to the text.

Wondering about adding color and other formatting to text in tables? Check out this article on conditional formatting.

To add color, follow these steps:

  1. Highlight the text you want to colorize. The text toolbar should automatically open, but you can also re-open it any time by pressing on a Mac or Ctrl on a PC.

  2. Click on the down arrow ( v ) next to the A icon, in the middle of the toolbar.

  3. This will open the text color menu. The first section of the menu shows the options for changing the actual text color, while the second section shows the highlight options. Choose any combination of text color and / or highlighting that you want.

  4. If you want to reset the text color at any point, just click the Clear option at the bottom of the menu.

FAQs

Can I change my font to something else besides Standard or Serif?

At this time, the only font options are Standard and Serif.

Can I add custom colors for fonts?

Not on the canvas. But you can add custom colors to conditional formatting rules. If you’re looking to add custom text color for table content, give that a try!

I want all of the text for every row in a column to be a certain color. How can I do that?

We recommend using conditional formatting to bulk apply formatting in tables.

Can I make text larger without actually making it a header?

If you want to increase the size for a certain section of text, the only way to do so is to convert that text to a header of some type. If you want to increase the size of all text on a page, consider using the page options to do so.

Can I change the font or text size used within a table?

At this time, it isn’t possible to change the font type used within tables. The page-level font setting will only apply to text outside of tables. As for size, you can use the same instructions in the section above to adjust the size of text within a table. Note that the column type must be either Text or Canvas in order to edit the text in this way.

Can I convert my text to code blocks, quotes, callouts, etc.?

Absolutely! There are many different paragraph styles available. Learn all about them here.


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