You may have noticed lately that we’ve launched some great tools to help you give your docs more visual polish and a sense of identity. Publishing features like cover images and author bylines can really help frame your docs and sections, but we thought it was time to give a little more character to the text itself. Today, I’m excited to share two new changes with you: a new serif font style and new large font size.
Font Sizes & Styles can be configured at the section-level. To do so, hover over the top of your section canvas to expose the word ‘Options,’ and then click it to open the Section Options right-side panel. If you want to apply your font settings as the default for all new sections in a doc, you can toggle from ‘This Section’ to ‘Settings.’ If you also want to apply your choices to all existing sections in a doc, click the “Apply to all sections” option and proceed.
When you change your font settings, table titles (which are recognized as headers) will be updated, but text within a table will remain standard sans serif.
Please be advised that changing the fonts within a section (e.g., one paragraph with serif font, and the next with sans serif font) is not supported at this time. We also do not support custom fonts. You can still use pull quotes, block quotes, code blocks, checklists, bullets, etc. as before to style your text.
One last heads-up: With this change, we’ve also introduced some updates to spacing within sections. We’ve removed the built-in space before headings, and the built-in space before and after quote styles. You may wish to manually add spaces or horizontal lines if you find these elements looking squished.
The serif font is nice typographically and the only downside is that it is a bit bulkier than Sans-Serif. Overall Coda is a bit spacy - menus, drop-downs, font size… but I guess this is an easy possible tweak.
It would be nice to be a bit more stylish in the docs in general and use typography and custom colors on a pararaph/word level. I know this is maybe not a focus for a tool like Coda, and would be fair.
Thanks for the comment. Printing is another request in another topic. It’s not at the front of the line yet, but we do have all notes logged from the request topics.
I applaud the new styles, but i’m curious about why you removed spacing. Is it possible for there to be a toggle? Adding empty paragraphs is quite hacky and doesn’t look near as polished as built-in spacing based on heading size.
Hi Drew, I’m the designer who worked on this update. You’re talking about the spacing above headings? Good question.
Previously, we had a small amount of space above headings and pull quotes. If you added an extra line break yourself, the space was a little too large. If you didn’t, the space was a little too small.
When we were working on the update, we set out the headings on a baseline grid, and realized that the appropriate amount of space above a heading was often a little bit larger than a full line of text. We biased towards making that portion of the space a real newline, and only adding padding for the remainder. This has a few benefits— it makes it easier to insert a new paragraph above the heading, and it lets you skip the line in the rare cases when you don’t need it (ie if you have several headings stacked). If you have examples of docs where the spacing doesn’t look polished to you, please send my way!
Currently we have the two font options you mentioned, there aren’t options for custom fonts. Word processors do allow for custom fonts, but there isn’t as much of a need for it in collaborative workspaces and apps, so you don’t see it as much in this category.
More than anything, size would be an ideal component to change. Font type not so much, but tables would be so much more user friendly if they could be smaller. Really just down to the equivalent of 9pt would be so nice!
It’s generally bad practice to introduce additional line breaks to achieve spacing. In most WYSIWYG editors a carriage return (Enter) is a new paragraph/heading and it is expected some form spacing to separate paragraphs will be present depending upon the surrounding font styles.
Given we (Coda users) have limited control over fonts and text sizing (under than a few presets), it is really on Coda to provide appropriate margins and padding. I’d rather see features that enable control over margins/padding rather than crude line breaks to add spacing.
Thank you for the feedback. Like Evan mentioned in his post, would you mind sending screenshots of where this isn’t working for you? Feel free to message me or @EvanBrooks with those.
The idea isn’t about making you add the line break, it’s just discussing the size of the spacing to be that of a line break. So I think you should have proper padding. Again, send screenshots if you are not seeing this work as you’d expect.
@BenLee To reiterate what @Justin_Menga pointed out, there is no padding between paragraphs—and there is no option to adjust the size of spacing between paragraphs—so it does force us to add the line break if we want any space between paragraphs.
Am I missing something?
See below—examples of the same text in a Google Doc and Notion doc (with visible paragraph padding), then a Coda doc (with no option for paragraph padding).
I see what you’re talking about now. Thank you for the screen capture.
Needing an additional line for paragraphs is by design and likely has to do with the fact that Coda offers a good bit more as far as capability. The canvas is used in many different ways across many different use-cases.
Other items like our collaborative editing are also done differently than others and I think you’ll find that we set a very high mark there as well.
I’ll let the team know, but so far this looks to be by design.
