When a text frame is selected, you can define in the Content inspector, how many text columns the text frame should use. The default has one text column and its width is identical to the frame width.
Using two or more text columns, you can define the column width as automatic or fixed, and define the distance between text columns. So you can easily create multi-column layouts without having to align multiple text frames. You can format all in a single text frame.
In this section, you can specify if text in a text column should use the whole available text frame's area or if an area on top, bottom, left and/or right should stay empty. A text offset is recommended e.g. when you want to assign a colored outline to a text frame when the outline would overlap text placed directly at the frame edge.
iCalamus offers an automatic hyphenation which can be adjusted here. Choose 'never' if you want to switch hyphenation off, or move the slider towards 'often' if you want to increase the number of hyphens used in a text frame.
Select the language which should be assigned to this text frame generally. Basically text frames get the language of your iCalamus launch. If text frames are linked, the language will always be assigned to the whole chain of text frames. The language is used for spell checking and automatic hyphenation of the text.
In order to offer hyphenation dictionaries for automatic hyphenation, the Hyphenator plug-in has to be loaded. This plug-in contains the free available hyphenation dictionaries which you can exchange for others that you may prefer. You have to ensure that the dictionaries have the expected format.
You find the dictionaries this way:
[Control]-click on iCalamus.app in Finder and select
Show Package Contents
.
Navigate in this package content to the directory Contents/System/.
There you find all iCalamus plug-ins.
Now use Show Package Contents
for the plug-in
Hyphenator.plugin in Finder.
Navigate to the directory Contents/Resources/ in this package content.
There you find all hyphenation dictionaries which use the names hyph_xx_XX.dic. xx_XX stands for an ISO country notation, like e.g. en_CA stands for English (Canada).
In the Text Wrap inspector, you can define for each embedded frame, how the text should wrap around that frame. When you check this switch for a selected text frame, the text in this text frame no longer wraps around the embedded frames.
