Another use of a tab stop is to align the decimal points in numbers on a tab stop with the Dec Tab key. When you press the Dec Tab key, the cursor moves to the next tab stop, and the text you type moves to the left until you press a decimal point or the Return key. You can tell the difference between text typed with a regular tab and a decimal tab because the regular tab displays as a ~ and the decimal tab as a L on the screen.
Text with a decimal tab must fit between tab stops so that the numbers line up with the decimal point. Most of the time, you'll need to change the format line when you want decimal text with a decimal tab in order to allow more room between tab stops.
Using the procedure below, change the format line and type in some num-bers using the Dec Tab key.
Step You Type Screen Says
[t}urpose. Every
FORMAT Change format
IT!
(1) ~ ... ~ 1..Step You Type Screen Says Comments
7 ( DEC TAB ) L $459.82 Go to the next
$459.82 line and try
another number.
Notice how the decimal points line up.
8 ( RETURN) L $459.82 .... You don't need ( DEC TAB) L$3,422.12D this in the
docu-$3,422.12 ment, so cancel
the insert.
9 ( CANCEL) Are you sure? You see this
message whenever you stop text insertion.
10 ( EXECUTE ) [!]hat purpose
4/83 Setting Horizontal Layout 3-23
10 Setting Vertical Layout
The elements of vertical layout have a significant impact on the way your document is printed. Changing vertical layout by altering text length, line spacing, page breaks, and top and bottom margins, gives you different results with new and old documents. Changing the vertical format before you start a new document, or while you create one, makes the printed document follow the layout you've chosen. When you alter the vertical format in an old docu-ment, the text on the editing screen moves to match those changes.
The basic element of vertical spacing is the page. Any change to an element of vertical spacing alters how the text is broken up into pages. The editing screen shows you where pages end with a symbol called a page break. There are two kinds of page breaks you can use: optional and required. It's im-portant to learn about the differences before going on to other format changes.
OPTIONAL PAGE BREAKS
You can add optional page breaks at the text length you have specified as you type the document or when you use the hyphenation and pagination func-tion. An optional page break appears in the text as a line of dashes between two lines of text. You can remove it manually, or automatically when you use the pagination feature. You will learn more about hyphenation and pagi-nation in Part 5.
REQUIRED PAGE BREAKS
Required page breaks are those you put in to force a new page, for example to end a page at the end of the chapter, or to set off a chart on a separate page.
The required page break symbol is a row of equals signs. Required page breaks are not removed during pagination.
Each optional or required page break you set is automatically followed by a format line, reflecting the last format line on the previous page. When you print the document, the pages will end and begin according to the page breaks you set on the editing screen.
3-24 Page and Document Layout 4/83
Suppose you have a text length of 54 lines. When you begin line 55, the line and position indicators in the status line brighten. At this point you can put in an optional page break using the Insert and the Page keys. Remember, a printed page usually corresponds to three screen's worth of text, so you won't see the status line brighten at the end of every screen. When you change the text length or line spacing, you change the line on which the page break signal occurs. You can add required page breaks by holding down the Shift key and pressing the Page key.
You can delete page breaks when you need to. Just move the cursor to the page break, and press the Delete key and then the Execute key. Both the page break and its format line leave the screen.
THE IMPORTANCE OF PAGE BREAKS
Since you can keep on typing and adding lines to a page even beyond a specified page length, you may be tempted to do this and add page breaks later, either manually or through the pagination feature. This is not advisable for three reasons.
First, if you have a document that's one very long page in length, each time you edit the text the whole document is revised on the screen instead of just the page you're working on. The longer this page is, the longer it takes you to see your corrections or new text on the screen. Therefore, your work will go more slowly.
Second, you'll find it more difficult to determine how your document will look if you wait to paginate it when you're finished with it. One important feature of the editing screen is that you can see the end of one page and the beginning of another on the screen at the same time.
Third, the longer the page without page breaks, the more likely it is that your Fortune system will not have enough memory to edit your document.
PAGE BREAKS AND INDENTED TEXT
If you add a page break between lines of indented text, the indent function will be removed beyond the page break. Since you can see across the page break on the editing screen, just insert a new indent at the beginning of the next page.
4/83 Setting Vertical Layout 3-25