Can I format text such and so in the visual editor?

By design, Plone's visual editor (Kupu) does not allow a full range of formatting options such as font colour or size. However, Plone supports custom styles that can be used as follows:

• The site administrator defines styles in the editor's configuration (Site Setup > Visual editor > Config > Styles). A paragraph style consists of a name, the HTML element it applies to and optionally a CSS class name.
• The site's designer assigns CSS properties to these styles in a custom stylesheet (e.g. ploneCustom.css).
• The author assigns styles to text using the style selection pulldown in the visual editor.

In this way, only semantic mark-up ends up being stored in the content, so that the site can be styled or re-styled consistently using CSS. It's up to the site administrator and the designer to provide authors with a rich set of meaningful styles.

As of Plone version 3, you can create custom styles for:

• entire block level elements, such as headings and paragraphs (HTML elements: h1..h6, p, div, pre, blockquote)
• text within a paragraph: character styles, also known as inline styles (HTML element: span)
• tables and rows and cells within tables (HTML elements: table, tr, th, td)

In Plone 2.1 and 2.5, only block level elements and tables could be styled.

In the visual editor's configuration, table styles are defined in the list under the heading "Tables", and all other styles (including character styles) in the list under "Paragraph styles".

Other options

If you do not want to enforce consistency, and you would like a more traditional editing environment, it's possible to plug in another editor, such as FCKEditor, instead of Kupu.