Editing Text

Text properties - everything you need to control using the Text Editor

K
Written by Kate Moir
Updated over a week ago

All text is contained within a text box or panel, of which there many varieties (see our Text items article for more information). But whether it's a simple text box or a more complex text panel you can easily add it to your document by clicking Text in the left hand toolbar. Simply select the sort of text you want to add, for example Normal Text for simple body text. That will add the text box to your document and you can position the text box within your document by dragging on its edge.

If you add a simple text box such as Normal text, or other options under Basic, you can just start typing to add your text to the box. If you have selected a more complex text item, such as a text panel from Fancy Text, then first click in the default text within the panel to change it.

Editing text is easy - just click in your text to place a text cursor, and a handy context sensitive bar with all the most frequently used controls will pop-up, plus you'll see a panel with the full set of text controls to the right of the editing area. You can click and drag to select text in the usual way.

The Text Context Bar

If you click on a text component such as a text panel, which is made up of multiple elements, the first icon on the left of the context bar will be the layer controls (move backwards, forwards, to front and to back) . Otherwise the bar will start with the most frequently used font controls - Text style, font, font size and color:

...and to the right of the bar you'll see style and alignment options, lists (number and bullet point), indents, add a web link, a lock option so Admins can prevent team members from editing brand sensitive items such as logos, and copy & paste format. Finally there's the all important comment icon (see Commenting for more on this feature).

The Text Properties Panel

When you click in some text a panel will also appear on the right of the editing area with the full set of text editing features:

Alignment options

The settings in the alignment panel control how a block of text behaves within a text box. 

The settings in the top row control the various justify options - left, center, right and fully justified. The settings in the middle row control the alignment options - the text can be fixed or aligned to the top, middle or bottom of the box.  

On the left of the bottom row is Fit to container.  Auto-fitted text changes its font size dynamically to always fit the text into the text area...

If you change the dimensions of a text item the font automatically resizes to fit the new size and if you add more text to an item the font resizes to fit the available space - like this...

The final option is Shrink text on overflow. This controls what happens to the text when it overflows a text area. So with this option selected text will scale down so that it always fits the text area - useful for instances where you need to add more text yet are confined to a specific size.

If you subsequently drag the text area out to increase the area or if you delete some text then the text size will increase to fill the area but it won't get any larger than the original size.


Check out this tutorial for more info on the text panel...

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