How to do line spacing and flexible text

It took me a lot of tries to figure out this easy hack, so I thought I’d save others the trouble.

If you’re going to print out forms, it tempting to drag fields into place on a blank canvas and then format each field and hit print.

The problems arise if you have content where the text is of unknown length. You don’t know how much space to leave, and it ends up being holey.

The alternative is to simply type the name of each field in brackets, like this:

[name]

[description]

[price]

Which will cause the fields to stay stacked, regardless of how much data is in each one, flowing longer ones and filling space for the shorter ones.

And you can format it, not just with fonts and sizes.

Go to TextEdit, build into every Mac

Make a new doc

Don’t miss this step: under FORMAT, hit MAKE RICH TEXT

(this cost me two hours of poking around)

now, go ahead and put your bracketed fields in, and you can change the layout all you like.

Then, copy what you’ve got, and paste it back into your form.

Done.

Hope this helps.

• This topic was modified 1 year ago by Seth Godin.