Text Control

A text control is used to specify a block of text to be placed over an image. Text controls are currently only used by the Lines, Arrows, Text tool.

Font

This lets you select the font name for the text. The menu includes all the fonts currently installed on your system. The Text control (see below) is displayed in the selected font.

Font Size and Style

This lets you set the font height in pixels. Just to the right of the Font Size are three buttons - the first toggles Bold on and off, the second toggles Italic on and off, and the third brings up a drop shadow control.

Line Spacing

This lets you adjust the spacing between lines of multi-line text. This setting is sometimes called leading, referring back to the days of typesetting using lead type. Larger numbers provide more space between lines.

Alignment

The block of text is surrounded by an imaginary bounding box, just large enough to hold all of the text. The alignment setting specifies what part of the bounding box is to be aligned with the location of the text on the image. When you choose Center, Left, Right, Top, Bottom, Upper Left, Upper Right, Lower Left, or Lower Right, the corresponding part of the bounding box is aligned with the point you position over the input image.

Text

You enter the text to be painted over the image here. The edit control will scroll as necessary to accommodate up to 256 lines of text and up to 32000 characters. To transfer large amounts of text from a document or other program, you can copy the text onto the clipboard and then paste it into the Text control. To paste into an edit control, simply click on the control to make the cursor a caret (vertical line) and then press Ctrl-V.

To enter special characters click the Unicode... button and select the character or symbol you want to insert.

To enter macros, click the Macro... button.

Text Color

This control lets you select the text color.

Text Transparency

The Text Transparency slider lets you adjust the transparency of the text.

Background Color

This control lets you select the color of the background rectangle. This setting is ignored if Background Transparency is set to be 100% (see below).

Background Transparency

The Background Transparency slider lets you adjust the transparency of the background rectangle.

Text Margins

The background rectangle is made to fit around the text box with equal text margins (in pixels).

Outline Color

This control lets you select the color of a border drawn just inside the background rectangle. This setting is ignored if Outline Width (see below) is set to 0.

Outline Width

This controls sets the width (in pixels) of the outline drawn just inside the edges of the background rectangle. No outline is drawn if Outline Width is set to 0. If the Outline Width is greater than or equal to the Text Margins setting, it is treated as though you entered the Text Margins setting minus one.