Here you can see a frame with three paragraphs of text written into it. The first has normal line spacing, and is aligned at the left margin; it has a little extra space after it. The second is indented, and has a bullet character to mark the first line. The third is again ranged left, but has a higher interline spacing, or perhaps is printed in a larger type size.

You can pre-set any of these properties by using paragraph styles – these are described in the next section.

This is typical of the way NewLeaf handles free text – the APL application supplies a set of text vectors (one per paragraph) and some formatting instructions, for example to treat each paragraph as a numbered indent with a given margin and spacing. NewLeaf then flows the text into the width of the frame, and will automatically move to a new page when the frame is full.

If you have some pre-formatted text (such as a function listing) you can place a text matrix rather than flowing a text vector. In this case NewLeaf does not attempt any wrapping, and any lines that do not fit the frame overflow to the right.

Some of the paragraph properties which you may like to investigate in more detail are: Font (typestyle, size and spacing); Colour; Indents; Keep Together; Minimum Space After; Alignment. These are all set initially to reasonable defaults, so that you can ignore the more advanced properties until you need them.