Mac OS® X Snow Leopard™ for Dummies®

Chapter 13. Words and Letters

In This Chapter

• Processing words with TextEdit

• Finding out all about Leopard's fonts

• Managing fonts with Font Book

As I discuss in previous chapters, your Mac is well equipped for creating and managing media — music, movies, DVDs, and photos. But your Mac is also ready to handle more common tasks, such as typing a letter or writing an essay.

Furthermore, your Mac comes stocked with a wide variety of fonts (sometimes called typefaces), which allow you to change the way text looks on the screen and the printed page, as shown in Figure 13-1.

Figure 13-1. Each of these fonts has its own unique look.

In this chapter, you look at the Mac OS X Snow Leopard text-composition program, called TextEdit, and explore fonts and how to manage them.

Processing Words with TextEdit

TextEdit is a word processor/text editor that you can use to write letters, scribble notes, or open Read Me files. It's not as sophisticated as Microsoft Word (or Apple's Pages, QuarkXpress, or Adobe InDesign, for that matter), but you can definitely use it for light word processing and text editing. It's capable of doing some (but not much) text formatting, and can even check your spelling.

TextEdit supports images, too. Just copy an image from another program and paste it into a TextEdit document. Or you can drag-and-drop an image into a TextEdit document from many applications.

TextEdit can even open ...