Using the Text Palette While Editing a Caption

While you’re editing a caption, select any portion of the text and set the font, size, style, and color using the Text Palette.

You can also enter mathematical symbols and mathematical formatting in a caption.

Entering Mathematical Symbols and Formatting

Press the Symbolic Notation button in the Text Palette to display additional notation tools you can use to enter mathematical symbols and other formatting, like overbars, fractions, exponents, and grouping symbols.

If you’re using a Windows computer, you can drag these symbolic notation tools so that they’re floating or so that they’re docked to any side of the Sketchpad window. If you’re using a Macintosh computer, these symbolic notation tools appear as a second row of buttons in the Text Palette.

The symbolic notation tools are divided into four groups.

Overbar Buttons: Click one of the overbar buttons to add a segment, a ray, a line, or an arc overbar to the selected text. These buttons are available only when there’s text selected.

Operator Buttons: Click one of the operator buttons to add a fraction, square root, superscript (exponent), or subscript to the selected text. If there is no selected text, the operator is inserted with ? symbols in the places which you need to fill in.

Grouping Buttons: Click one of the grouping buttons to enclose the selected text in parentheses, square brackets, curly braces, or absolute value symbols. Unlike parentheses and brackets you type from the keyboard, mathematical grouping symbols always appear in pairs and resize automatically to fit whatever expression they enclose.

Symbol Buttons: Click one of the symbol buttons to insert an angle symbol, pi, the degree symbol, or any of the additional common symbols that appear in a pop-up menu when you press and hold on the last of these buttons.

You can combine the symbolic notation tools to add traditional mathematical notation to your captions or to invent new notations of your own.

To display symbolic notation, Sketchpad uses a special font containing mathematical symbols. By default, it uses the Symbol font that comes installed on every computer. If you wish to use some other font, you can change the Math Symbol font in System Preferences.