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Practice

Adding and Formatting Paragraphs

In the previous lesson, we learned how to add headings and paragraphs to a document.

The most fundamental element when writing a document, and the one most frequently used, is the Paragraph.

Using python-docx, you can easily add large volumes of text content or programmatically apply conditional formatting.


Adding a Paragraph​

To add a paragraph, you use the add_paragraph() method.

You pass the text you want to add to the paragraph as an argument to add_paragraph.

Adding a Paragraph
doc.add_paragraph('This is the first paragraph.')

The code above adds a new paragraph to the document containing the text "This is the first paragraph."


Adding Multiple Paragraphs​

By using the add_paragraph method along with a loop, you can add multiple paragraphs at once.

Adding Multiple Paragraphs
texts = ['This is the first paragraph.', 'This is the second paragraph.', 'This is the third paragraph.']

for text in texts:
    doc.add_paragraph(text)
Result
This is the first paragraph.
This is the second paragraph.
This is the third paragraph.

You can use this approach to easily add large amounts of data from an Excel file or other sources to a document.


Formatting Text​

By using the run object, you can style text added to a paragraph in various ways.

This object is a part of the Paragraph object and represents a portion of the text with specific formatting within the paragraph.

A run object represents a consecutive run of text with the same formatting, and you can use multiple runs to compose a single paragraph.

Formatting Text
# Create a new document
doc = Document()

# Add a paragraph to the document
paragraph = doc.add_paragraph('This text is ')

run = paragraph.add_run('1. bold ')
run.bold = True  # Set bold

run = paragraph.add_run('2. and ')
run.italic = True  # Set italic

run = paragraph.add_run('3. large')
run.font.size = Pt(24)  # Set font size

This code sets the following attributes to the text within a single paragraph using bold, italic, and font size 24pt for the specified words.


Applying Styles to Paragraphs​

You can apply styles like 'Title' and 'Subtitle' from Word to paragraphs as follows.

Adding Document Title and Subtitle
doc.add_paragraph('Document Title', style='Title')

doc.add_paragraph('Subtitle', style='Subtitle')

In this lesson, we learned how to add paragraphs and format the text within them.

In the next lesson, we will learn how to add lists to a document.

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