Text Tool

Placing Text

Pick the Text tool with Shift+T or from the toolbar, then click on the canvas. A text box opens where you clicked and you type straight into it, with a live preview of the rendered pixels underneath.

• Click — Places point text that grows as wide as you type
• Drag — Sets a bounding box first, and the text wraps at that width. Drag the handle on the right edge of the box to change the width later
• Click an existing text layer — Reopens it for editing with all of its settings restored to the tool options row

Enter inserts a newline. Ctrl+Enter commits, and so does the check button on the text box or clicking away from it when the text is not empty. Escape abandons the edit and never commits it. This follows the rule across the app: Escape keeps a change to art that already exists, like a transform, but throws away something you are still creating, like a text box, a curve or an unfinished polygon.

The Text tool is an advanced tool, so it is hidden in Simple mode.

Tool Options

The tool options row carries the whole style of the next piece of text you place:

• Font — One dropdown listing your pixel fonts first, then a divider, then the vector fonts, each drawn in its own face. Picking a font that carries a suggested size applies that size for you. The gear button beside it opens the Font Manager
• Font Size — Up to 128. Vector fonts start at 6 and step by 1. Pixel fonts start at the font's own line height and step in whole multiples of it, so a bitmap face never lands between pixel rows
• Pixel Snap — Vector fonts only. Thresholds the rendered glyphs to hard pixels, with a Pixel Snap Threshold slider (1 to 255, default 128) that appears once snapping is on and decides how much of each soft edge turns solid
• AA — Pixel fonts only. Off by default for crisp aliased glyphs, on to soften the edges
• Bold, Italic, Underline — Three toggles. Pixel fonts have no separate bold or italic face, so those two are synthesized from the glyphs
• Vertical — Stacks the characters down the column instead of across the line
• Rotate — Each press turns the text another 90°, cycling 90, 180, 270 and back to 0. The current angle shows next to the button while it is not 0
• Alignment — Left, Center, Right or Justify, applied per line
• Spacing — Extra pixels between characters, 0 by default
• Lines — Extra pixels between lines, 0 by default

Text takes the primary color and its alpha at the moment you click, so set the color before you place the text.

Text Layers

Committing creates a text layer rather than pixels on the layer you were on. That layer keeps the string and every setting above, which is what makes a later edit possible, and it can hold different text per keyframe. Rasterize it when you want to paint on the letters directly.

Text Layers covers the layer side: font types and the Font Manager, importing your own .ttf, .otf, .woff and .bdf files, rasterizing, and how text behaves across frames.

Tips

• A pixel font at its own line height gives text that matches the resolution of your art. Scale it by whole multiples rather than picking an in-between size.
• Turn Pixel Snap on when you want a vector font to read as pixel art, and lower the threshold if the glyphs come out too thin.
• Drag a bounding box for anything longer than a couple of words. It saves retyping when the line turns out too wide.
• Vector fonts render scripts that need joined letterforms or right-to-left order (Arabic, Hebrew, Devanagari, Thai and similar) correctly, pixel-snapped or not. Pixel fonts look up one glyph per character with no shaping, so those scripts come out as separated, unjoined letters; the tool warns you when that happens.