Rich Text canvas

The Rich Text canvas holds formatted prose. It is the canvas you will use most, and the one the other kinds borrow conventions from.

What it supports

Headings, paragraphs, bold and italic and the rest of the inline styles, ordered and unordered lists with nesting, tables, block quotes, inline code, and links — to a page in this notebook, to a page in another notebook, or out to the web.

Editing

Select the canvas and press Enter to start editing. Escape stops editing and returns you to having the canvas selected as an object.

Inside the canvas, Tab does not insert a tab character. It indents the current list item, and Shift+Tab outdents it — the behaviour every outliner and word processor has trained people to expect. Because Tab is spent on indentation, moving out of the canvas is Escape’s job.

Text layout

Text wraps at word-level break opportunities chosen to preserve meaning rather than to fill lines as tightly as possible. Numbers do not split across lines: a decimal stays whole and $12.50 stays whole. Where no acceptable break exists, the unit is kept intact and allowed to overflow rather than broken in a place that would change how it reads.

Reflow and text layout covers the rules in detail.

Captions

A Rich Text canvas with a transparent background, grouped with a Picture, is how a caption is made. There is no separate caption field with its own reduced formatting — a caption is rich text, so it can hold a link, an emphasis, or a citation like any other prose.

Transparency

Rich Text canvases can be transparent, which is what allows them to be layered over a Picture as a label or annotation rather than sitting beside it.