Copying a look with the format painter in Write by Zaweba

Copying a look from one paragraph to another should take a second, not a minute of clicking through dialogs. When a heading, a quote or a line of contact details is already formatted just how you want it, the format painter in Write by Zaweba lifts that formatting and puts it on the next text you choose.

How it works

Click in the text that has the formatting you like, or select some of it. Then choose Format painter from the Edit menu. The next selection you make with the mouse receives that formatting. Drag across the words or paragraph you want to change, and they take on the same look.

It copies both kinds of formatting: character formatting, such as font, size, bold, italic and colour, and paragraph formatting, such as alignment, indents, spacing and borders. That means one action can make a paragraph match another completely.

Copy formatting and Paste formatting

The Edit menu also has Copy formatting and Paste formatting as separate commands. They do the same job in two steps, which is handy when the target is not right there. Copy the formatting from one place, scroll or move to another part of the document, select the text and paste the formatting. Because they are commands in the menu rather than a one-shot mouse action, you can paste the same formatting onto several places in turn.

Jobs it is good for

Tidying a document stitched together from several sources is the classic case. A report built from paragraphs written by different people often ends up with three fonts and four sizes. Format one paragraph properly, then paint that look onto the others.

CVs benefit too. Each job entry might have a bold job title, an italic employer and dates aligned to the right. Get the first entry right and copy it to the rest, and the whole CV lines up.

In newsletters and club notices, a highlighted box or a coloured heading for one item can be copied to the next item, so every section has the same treatment.

Painter or styles

The format painter copies formatting once; it does not create a link. If you later change the original, the copies stay as they were. For small documents and one-off matching, that is fine.

For anything that repeats through a long document, styles are the stronger choice. Every heading set in a heading style changes together when you edit the style, and headings also feed the navigation pane and the table of contents. A sensible rule is to use the painter for quick fixes and styles for the backbone of a document.

The two work well together. If a paragraph has drifted from its style because someone formatted it by hand, Format > Clear formatting removes the direct formatting and lets the style show again. If you then want a single special paragraph to match another unusual one, the painter copies it across.

Avoiding surprises

Paint onto whole paragraphs when you are copying paragraph settings. If you drag across part of a paragraph, the character formatting changes for those words, and the paragraph settings apply to the paragraph they sit in, which may be more than you intended.

Check what you are copying from. If the source has a highlight left over from proofreading, that highlight will travel too. Undo puts things back straight away if the result isn't what you wanted, and because undo in Write is unlimited you can step back through several paints if needed.