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Use special text effects

How do you emphasize text?

Word offers some formatting choices for text that offer more visual impact than the old standbys, bold and italic.

• A dropped capital letter, used at the start of a document or beginning of a new chapter.

• Text effects such as emboss, engrave, and shadow.

• WordArt formatting for bold flash.

They include:

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Create a drop cap

An ancient illuminated text, the start of a fairy tale, the large first letter that sometimes begins a chapter.

In modern typography, that’s referred to as a drop cap.

The steps are simple: You select the letter you want to turn into a drop cap, and click Drop Cap on the Insert tab.

The drop cap sits in a text box, and you can apply any text formatting to it. The picture shows examples of different fonts you might use.

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Create a drop cap

You can turn only a single letter into a drop cap.

Even if you select a block of text, only the first letter is affected.

Also, only the first letter of a paragraph can become a drop cap.

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Special font effects

While font style and color do a lot to give impact to text, you can add a little more to the look with different effects.

The picture shows examples.

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An embossing effect makes the text look raised off the page.

An outline effect, removes the solid color fill in the text.

An engraving effect makes text look pressed into the page.

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Special font effects

These three effects, plus shadowing (not shown) can be used to make a simple heading look more like a logo.

They have more impact on bigger font sizes, sometimes they’re enhanced by bold or italic formatting, and they’re best used sparingly.

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Add WordArt

WordArt is not for the faint of heart.

Where text effects operate on subtlety, WordArt is big and flashy, and treats text almost like a graphic.

Create WordArt by typing the text you want to style in a WordArt editing dialog box (opened from the Insert tab).

Once WordArt is applied, you treat the affected text somewhat like a picture. You click to select it, which makes WordArt Tools available, with several formatting options on the Format tab.