formattingtextedit
I had some background text color styles on my old mac and now have Mavericks – but I don't see any way to create a style for a highlighter-type background (for a sentence, paragraph etc.) – The Fonts panel doesn't have background color anymore, just an entire document background color.
Does anyone know how I can get this functionality again?
You could also use WriteRoom. It's based on TextEdit but has a few additional features like customizable themes.
RTF table support is quite limited in TextEdit.
If the column you want to get rid of is not the last column in the table (in which case grgarside's answer above is your best option) you can try the procedure below:
Let's say you want to delete column "c" below:
Hold down Option to mark the contents of the column (note that the cursor changes shape to a cross):
Now you can either:
Press Delete to delete its contents:
Position the cursor in every empty cell and press the fndelete key combination (you can also use the delete ⌦ key, but you will have to rearrange columns later):
until you have deleted all of them:
or:
Press Merge in Format > Table...:
Select the contents of the column and delete them by pressing Delete:
Place the cursor in the empty column and press the fndelete key combination (you can also use the delete ⌦ key, but you will have to rearrange columns later) to delete it.
I wish it were more straightforward, but unfortunately it isn't.
Best Answer
This might depend on whether your document is formatted as rich text (
.rtf,.docx, etc.) or plain text (.txt).If your document is plain text, I'm not sure why you would want to do this anyway, since your color changes won't be saved when you save the document.
When the document is formatted as rich text, you should see the rich text editor toolbar at the top of your window. The highlighting button is in the center, and looks like an "a" with a red slash through it (if you have no highlight color selected).
When there is a highlight color selected, it looks like an "a" with the highlight color as the background.
Hope that helps!