Toolbox: Text tool palette

Text Tool Palette
Text sprite overview
Creating text sprites with different formatting
Controlling text smoothing
Determining the length of text sprites
Editing text sprites

Using the text palette, you can create a sprite that consists of a line of text. You can choose any font available on your system, and adjust the color and size as you wish (note that to use different fonts, sizes, or colors, you'll need to create multiple text sprites). You can also adjust the opacity, so that background images show through the text.

Text Tool Palette:

Text sprite overview:

If a picture is worth a thousand words, imagine the value of a picture composed of words! The text tool in Image Composer is not a word processor, but rather a tool to create exciting text images in any font installed on your computer.

Text sprites are like any other sprites with respect to applying effects, resizing, and other tasks. Text sprites have special formatting attributes that you can modify after you create a text sprite, including the content of the text, font, and more. The following figure shows a text sprite and an edited, modified version of that sprite.

Creating text sprites with different formatting:

When you create a text sprite, the formatting you specify is applied to the entire text sprite. If you want one word or group of characters to have a different font or color from the rest of the text sprite, you must create another text sprite containing those characters with the different formatting.

Controlling text smoothing:

By default, text sprites are created with smoothing enabled. Smoothing is the result of Anti-aliasing which means that the edges of the letters are rendered with varying degrees of transparency to eliminate jagged edges. Smoothing lends an even, non-jagged, appearance to text that is generally desirable, but can lead to fuzzy-looking characters for small text sprites. To produce sharp edges, clear the Smoothing check box on the Text palette. In the following figure, the text sprite on the left has smoothing turned on; the sprite on the right has smoothing turned off.

Determining the length of text sprites:

When you create a text sprite, the default size of the text edit box limits the number of characters you can enter. To increase the size of the edit box and thus, the number of characters you can enter, drag one of the sides to an appropriate size, then increase it again if you need to. If the edit box is larger than necessary to accommodate the text, the bounding box of the sprite is adjusted to an exact fit when you render the sprite.

Editing text sprites:

You can apply any effect or tool to a text sprite. However, when you edit a text sprite, you lose any effects you have applied previously to that sprite. Be sure that the text and its formatting are what you want before you apply any effects to that sprite. However, if you make edits that are not what you want, you can undo the edits to return the text sprite to its pre-edited state. In addition, it is a good idea to keep track of the effects you applied to a text sprite so that you can duplicate your work.

Find out How-to use make some special text effects - Turned, Bas Relief and Relief

In the Image composer Help Topics (Alt, Shift+ H) if you put in the following headings in 'Find'. The rest of the actions detailed above, are covered in more depth.

Creating justified text
Creating text sprites
Editing Text sprites