A format is your set of choices among several optional characteristics.
The format of any character includes its font, its size, its style (plain, bold, italic, underlined, or strikethrough), its position (normal, superscript, or subscript), and its color. You do not have to retype a block of text to make these changes; you only have to change its format.
The format of any paragraph includes its alignment (centered, left-aligned, right-aligned, or fully justified), its indentation relative to the page margins, the locations and types of its tab stops, the amount of empty space above and below it, the spacing between lines within it, whether it's permissible to split the paragraph across a page break, and whether it's permissible to break the page immediately after the paragraph.
All of these are choices that you can make. When you don't explicitly
set the format of characters or paragraphs, they will appear in the default format.
Copyright 1996 by the Curators of the University of Missouri