Text panel

The following options are available directly on the panel:

• Text Style—allows a paragraph text style to be applied to selected text.
• Update Paragraph Style—redefines the current paragraph style to conform with the local formatting of the selected text. (Shown only when local formatting has been applied in addition to the selected text style.)

The following options are available in the expanded Text Styles section:

• Add Text Style—displays a submenu for creating a new paragraph, character or group style.
• Reset/Reapply Styles—displays a submenu to:
  • Reapply Text Styles—removes manually applied local formatting but keeps paragraph and character styles applied.
  • Reapply Base Styles—removes manually applied local formatting and character styles but keeps 'base' paragraph styles applied.
• Update Character Style—redefines the current character style to conform with the local formatting of the selected text.
• Update Paragraph Style—redefines the current paragraph style to conform with the local formatting of the selected text.
• Type—specifies whether the text style is a paragraph, character or group type.
• Text style name—displays the name of text styles currently available in the document.
• Options menu—shown at the right end of a text style's entry and provides access to a pop-up menu with creation and editing options.

The following options are available from Panel Preferences:

• Show Local Formatting—when selected, a local formatting box is displayed to show the text formatting directly applied to the currently selected character, word or paragraph (or the text under the text cursor). Paragraph and character styles are also shown if applied.
• Show Hierarchical—styles appear nested below styles which they are based on
• Show Samples—when turned on, each style name on the panel mirrors the corresponding style's settings. When turned off, all styles' names show with the same formatting.
• Sort By Type—when selected (default), paragraph styles are listed first, followed by character styles. If this option is off, styles are listed purely in alphabetical order.
• Delete Unused Styles—when selected, deletes any unused styles and removes them from the panel.
• Detach and Delete All Styles—when selected, deletes all styles and removes them from the panel.
• Save Styles as Default—when selected, saves styles as default styles.
• Import Styles—when selected, opens a pop-up dialog allowing you to select styles to import from another Affinity document.

The following settings are available directly on the panel:

• Font Family—sets the typeface for the selected text. Select from the pop-up menu.
• Font Colour—sets the colour of the text. Select from the pop-up panel.
• Font Size—controls the point size of characters.
• Traits—certain fonts come with a selection of traits you can choose from.
• Bold—select whether the text is emboldened.
• Italic—select whether the text is italicised.
• Underline—select whether the text has no underline or a single underline.
• Strikethrough—select whether the text has no strikethrough or a single strikethrough.

The following options are available in the expanded Character section:

• Text Style—allows a character text style to be applied to selected text.
• Update Character Style—redefines the current character style to conform with the local formatting of the selected text. (Shown only when local formatting has been applied in addition to the selected text style.)
• Font Family—sets the typeface for the selected text. Select from the pop-up menu.
• Traits—controls which typeface style is applied to the selected text (as supported from the font).
• Bold—select whether the text is emboldened.
• Italic—select whether the text is italicised.
• Font Colour—sets the colour of the text. Select from the pop-up panel.
• Background Colour—sets the colour applied behind the selected text (i.e., creating a highlight effect). Select from the pop-up panel.
• Underline—select whether the text has no underline or a single or double underline.
• Underline Colour—sets the colour of the text underline. If this is set to 'None', the underline colour will match the Font's colour. Select from the pop-up panel.
• Strikethrough—select whether the text has no strikethrough or a single or double strikethrough.
• Strikethrough Colour—sets the colour of the text strikethrough. If this is set to 'None', the strikethrough colour will match the Font's colour. Select from the pop-up panel.
• Outline Stroke—sets the outline stroke style and width, along with stroke cap, join and alignment.
• Outline Colour—sets the colour of the outline stroke. If this is set to 'None', the outline colour will match the Font's colour. Select from the pop-up panel.
• Standard Ligatures—applies any available typeface ligatures to the selected text.
• Contextual Alternatives—applies any alternative typeface designs available for glyphs depending on their relative position within a word or with respect to neighbouring glyphs.
• Ordinals—automatically applies a superscript to letters which are part of an ordinal number.
• Fractions—dynamically converts fractions into a single glyph.
• Superscript—converts text characters to superscript, i.e. characters are set higher than neighbouring characters and font size is decreased.
• Subscript—converts text characters to subscript, i.e. characters are set lower than neighbouring characters and font size is decreased.
• All Caps—displays all selected text as upper case (or small caps, if Small Caps option selected).
• Small Caps—displays lower case letters as miniature upper case.

The following subsections are also available in the expanded Character section:

Variations

When a variable font is applied to the selected text, allows you to change settings for each of the font's adjustable axes.

Available axes differ by font.

OpenType

Allows you to enable or disable OpenType font features where applicable. Apply a font to your text that supports OpenType features in order to use this.

The following additional settings are available in the expanded subsection:

• Hide Irrelevant Features—hides OpenType settings from the expanded section that are not available in the applied font.

Positioning

The following settings are available in the expanded subsection:

• Kerning Override—controls the kerning (distance) between characters.
• Tracking—controls the spacing between characters.
• Baseline—controls the position of the bottom of text characters. Positive values raise the baseline, negative values lower the baseline.
• Leading Override—applies a local override to selected text to increase the leading with regard to the paragraph’s leading.
• Shear—controls the extent of text slant. Positive values will tilt text to the left, negative values will tilt text to the right.
• Horizontal Scale—horizontal scale stretches the characters and spacing width with regard to point size.
• Vertical Scale—vertical scale stretches the characters with regard to point size.
• Super/Subscript—converts text characters to superscript or subscript, i.e. characters are set higher or lower than neighbouring characters, respectively, and font size is decreased.
• No break—enable to ensure lines will not be broken at the ends. Soft hyphens will still be honoured.

Language

Choose the language whose conventions you would like your text to follow for each available pop-up menu.

The expanded subsection allows you to specify separate languages for:

• Spelling—specifies the language dictionary to be used for spelling. This will be the default used by the other language options if they are unmodified (set to Auto). It also determines which user-defined filler text, if entered in Settings, is displayed in the selected text frame.
• Hyphenation language—specifies the language dictionary to be used for hyphenation. This can be used if a specific hyphenation dictionary is not available for the spelling language, but a suitable substitute is available. For example, it is possible to use English (Australia) spelling with English (United Kingdom) hyphenation.
• Typography script—specifies the language script to be used when applying OpenType rules. For example, the Ordinals OpenType feature ‘ordn’ applies mainly to Latin script, and the Petite Caps feature ‘pcap’ only applies for scripts with both upper- and lowercase forms (e.g. Latin, Cyrillic, Greek). The list of available scripts will depend on the current typeface.
• Typography language—specifies the language to be used when applying OpenType rules. For example, several OpenType features should only be applied to Japanese or Chinese text.

Optical Alignment

Optical Alignment determines how certain characters in your document (for example, punctuation marks or particular letters) will fit in relation to the text frame; this can be used to automatically extend lines beginning or ending with certain characters when text frames are snapped to page margin. Adjust the settings to ensure the characters you choose are aligned to your liking.

The following options are available in the expanded subsection:

The following settings are available directly on the panel:

• Left Align—sets the paragraph alignment to adhere to the left edge of the text container.
• Centre Align—sets the paragraph alignment to be equidistant between the left and right edges of the text container.
• Right Align—sets the paragraph alignment to adhere to the right edge of the text container.
• Justified Left—sets the paragraph alignment to both the left and right margins. The last line of a paragraph is left aligned.

The following additional settings are available in the expanded Justification and Flow section:

• Justified Centre—as with Justified Left, however, the last line of a paragraph is centre aligned.
• Justified Right—as with Justified Left, however, the last line of a paragraph is right aligned.
• Justified All—as with Justified Left, however, the last line of a paragraph is justified regardless of length (sometimes known as Force-Justified).
• Word Spacing—sets the minimum, desired or maximum gap allowed.
• Letter Spacing—sets the minimum, desired or maximum tracking allowed. Desired tracking is applicable when a paragraph has a justified alignment.

The following options are available directly on the panel:

• Bullet List—inserts a bulleted list.
• —inserts a numbered list based on decimal numbers.
• Roman List—inserts a numbered list based on small Roman numerals.
• Latin List—inserts a numbered list based on Latin alphabetic characters.

The following options are available in the expanded Bullets and Numbering section:

• Type—select a type of Bullet or a choice of numbering list styles from the pop-up menu.
• Level—enter a list level.
• Text—allows you to adjust the symbol(s) you wish to use for your list, as well as the spacing between the symbols and the text. Tap to edit using your in-built or Smart keyboard or tap the More (…) button to browse additional symbols via a glyph browser.
• Tab stop—adjust the distance text moves by in your list when the tab key is pressed.
• Alignment—select from Left Align Bullet/Number, Centre Align Bullet/Number, or Right Align Bullet/Number. For the latter two options, First Line Indent must be greater than 0.
• Start numbering at—for numbered lists, you can adjust the number the list starts from.
• Restart numbering—for numbered lists, you can restart the numbering at certain points within the list.
• Restart numbering now—enable to immediately restart the numbering from the current point within your list.
• Name—name your list.
• Global—enable this option to make this list available to be used multiple times within your design.
• Style—select a character style from the pop-up menu.

The following options are available directly on the panel:

• Decrease Indent—decreases the amount of indent at the start of text.
• Increase Indent—increases the amount of indent at the start of text.
• Left Indent—controls the left indent applied to the entire paragraph (excluding the first line).

The following additional settings can be adjusted in the expanded Indents and Tab Stops section:

Indents

• Right Indent—controls the right indent applied to the entire paragraph.
• First Line Indent—controls the indent applied to the first line of the paragraph.
• Last Line Outdent—controls the outdent applied to the last line of the paragraph.

Tab Stops

• Default Spacing—sets the default horizontal space added before a character when a tab () is inserted.
• Add Tab Stop—adds a new tab stop position using the currently set Default Spacing value. The new tab stop entry will appear in the box; you can override the default position by using the minus and plus buttons.
• Delete selected tab stop—shown on a tab stop entry, this removes a chosen tab stop.
• Tab Stop Advance—shown on a tab stop entry, expand to set advanced settings:
  • Tab stop alignment—sets the alignment of the selected tab stop to left, centre, right or decimal.
  • Tab stop leader—sets the characters (none, character, underline and strikeout) displayed before the selected tab stop.
  • Decimal—sets the decimal point character to align to when Tab stop alignment decimal is selected.
  • Character—sets the character to be used when Tab stop leader character is selected.
  • From right—defines tab stop measurement from the right edge of the column, rather than the left.

The following option is available directly on the panel:

• Leading—controls the distance between text baselines (vertical gap between lines) within the paragraph. Tap to select from the pop-up menu. Options include:
  • Default—sets the line spacing to the font's default (i.e., single).
  • Exactly—sets a fixed spacing (other text attributes are ignored for line spacing purposes). This can be adjusted using the presets in the pop-up menu.
  • % Height—sets spacing based on a percentage of the text's size. This can be adjusted using the presets in the pop-up menu.
  • At Least—sets a minimum spacing (actual line spacing may increase depending on other text attributes). This can be adjusted using the presets in the pop-up menu.
  • Multiple—controls line spacing as a portion of the default. This can be adjusted using the presets in the pop-up menu.

The following additional settings can be adjusted in the expanded Spacing section:

• Space Before—controls the vertical gap which precedes the paragraph. By default, this is not applied at the top of a column; this can be altered from the Use space before: pop-up menu.
• Space After—controls the vertical gap which succeeds the paragraph.
• Use space before—controls when Space Before paragraph settings are applied to the text. Select from the pop-up menu.
• Sum space before and after—when this is enabled, the sum of the Space Before and the Space After settings are used to determine spacing between paragraphs.
• Space between same styles—when this is enabled, you can manually set the spacing between paragraphs of the same style. Enter the value using the adjacent Space Between Paragraphs option.

The following settings are available directly on the panel:

• Vertical Position—specify the vertical alignment of the frame text to one of the following:
  • Top Align—sets the frame text alignment to adhere to the top margin.
  • Centre Align—sets the frame text alignment to be equidistant from the top and bottom margins.
  • Bottom Align—sets the frame text alignment to adhere to the bottom margin.
  • Justify—sets the frame text alignment to both the top and bottom margins.

The following options are available in the expanded Glyph Browser section:

• Font Family—sets the typeface for the selected text. Select from the pop-up menu (all valid installed fonts are listed).
• Traits—sets the font style, e.g., Bold.
• Lock Font and Traits—when unlocked, the font shown in the panel changes with the selected text's font, making it easier to find glyphs from the currently selected font. When locked, the font shown in the panel doesn’t change with text selection. This makes it easier to repeatedly use glyphs from a particular font.
• Subset—sets the chosen font subset to display glyphs from, e.g. Basic Latin, Arabic, Greek Extended.
• Search—enter a Glyph value, a Unicode value or a text phrase to locate a Glyph or Unicode character. For example, "G+0131", "U+00b0" or the phrase "degree" will all show the degree symbol, respectively.

The following options are available from Panel Preferences:

• Size—choose a display size for the glyphs; this benefits usability of the panel and does not affect the glyph output size.
• Glyphs/Unicode/Unicode Plus Alternates—orders items in the panel, displaying the chosen option's items first.
• Clear Recently Used—glyphs you use are added to the bottom of the panel for re-use. This option clears that list.