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Text and Font Options
option | typical default value | |
| PageWidth | WindowWidth | how wide to assume the page to be |
| TextAlignment | Left | how to align successive lines of text |
| TextJustification | 0 | how much to allow lines of text to be stretched to make them fit |
| Hyphenation | False | whether to allow hyphenation |
| ParagraphIndent | 0 | how many printer's points to indent the first line in each paragraph |
General options for text formatting.
If you have a large block of text containing no explicit newline characters, then Mathematica will automatically break your text into a sequence of lines. The option PageWidth specifies how long each line should be allowed to be.
| WindowWidth | the width of the window on the screen |
| PaperWidth | the width of the page as it would be printed |
| Infinity | an infinite width (no line breaking) |
| n | explicit width given in printer's points |
Settings for the PageWidth option in cells and notebooks.
The option TextAlignment allows you to specify how you want successive lines of text to be aligned. Since Mathematica normally breaks text only at space or punctuation characters, it is common to end up with lines of different lengths. Normally the variation in lengths will give your text a ragged boundary. But Mathematica allows you to adjust the spaces in successive lines of text so as to make the lines more nearly equal in length. The setting for TextJustification gives the fraction of extra space which Mathematica is allowed to add. TextJustification->1 leads to "full justification" in which all complete lines of text are adjusted to be exactly the same length.
| Left | aligned on the left |
| Right | aligned on the right |
| Center | centered |
| x | aligned at a position x running from  to  across the page |
Settings for the TextAlignment option.
When you enter a block of text in a Mathematica notebook, Mathematica will treat any explicit newline characters that you type as paragraph breaks. The option ParagraphIndent allows you to specify how much you want to indent the first line in each paragraph. By giving a negative setting for ParagraphIndent, you can make the first line stick out to the left relative to subsequent lines.
| LineSpacing->{c,0} | leave space so that the total height of each line is c times the height of its contents |
| LineSpacing->{0,n} | make the total height of each line exactly n printer's points |
| LineSpacing->{c,n} | make the total height c times the height of the contents plus n printer's points |
| ParagraphSpacing->{c,0} | leave an extra space of c times the height of the font before the beginning of each paragraph |
| ParagraphSpacing->{0,n} | leave an extra space of exactly n printer's points before the beginning of each paragraph |
| ParagraphSpacing->{c,n} | leave an extra space of c times the height of the font plus n printer's points |
Options for spacing between lines of text.
option | typical default value | |
| FontFamily | "Courier" | the family of font to use |
| FontSubstitutions | {} | a list of substitutions to try for font family names |
| FontSize | 12 | the maximum height of characters in printer's points |
| FontWeight | "Bold" | the weight of characters to use |
| FontSlant | "Plain" | the slant of characters to use |
| FontTracking | "Plain" | the horizontal compression or expansion of characters |
| FontColor | GrayLevel[0] | the color of characters |
| Background | GrayLevel[1] | the color of the background for each character |
Some typical font family names.
| FontWeight->"Plain" | text like this |
| FontWeight->"Bold" | text like this |
| FontWeight->"ExtraBold" | text like this |
| FontSlant->"Oblique" | text like this |
Some settings of font options.
Mathematica allows you to specify the font that you want to use in considerable detail. Sometimes, however, the particular combination of font families and variations that you request may not be available on your computer system. In such cases, Mathematica will try to find the closest approximation it can. There are various additional options, such as 
, that you can set to help Mathematica find an appropriate font. In addition, you can set FontSubstitutions to be a list of rules that give replacements to try for font family names.
There are a great many fonts available for ordinary text. But for special technical characters, and even for Greek letters, far fewer fonts are available. The Mathematica system includes fonts that were built to support all of the various special characters that are used by Mathematica. There are three versions of these fonts: ordinary (like Times), monospaced (like Courier), and sans serif (like Helvetica).
For a given text font, Mathematica tries to choose the special character font that matches it best. You can help Mathematica to make this choice by giving rules for 
and 
in the setting for the FontProperties option. You can also give rules for 
to specify explicitly from what font each character is to be taken.
