Edit Text popup: global text scaling, do not scale text in edit field, uniform text properties and/or UI scaling

Develop Feature Requests
1

This was already mentioned at the end of Make Text Tool Editor Background Color Setting More Accesible as part of accessibility issue, but I prefer opening a new post to distinguish color from size issue.

Text can be scaled in the Text tool’s Edit Text popup, by selecting the whole text and changing the font size. This is reflected directly in the text edit field. This is convenient to see how text mixing different font sizes will look in terms of relative size.

However, when dealing with very small or very big font sizes, it makes it very hard to work with. With my current resolution, I need to reduce my text size to 3-4 so it actually fits, and that makes the text preview too small to read properly.

2023-04-16 small text super small in edit popup
2023-04-16 small text super small in edit popup793×333 38.2 KB

In the screenshot above, you can see that a font size of 3 is good for my comic strip, but in the popup it’s very hard to read.

I tried to play with the document dpi so I don’t need a crazily small font size to make it work, but it didn’t seem to affect the result. Only the document size seemed to matter, and I don’t want to make my comic strip document bigger just to allow bigger font text. So, I have to keep working with small font sizes. However, my first suggestion to fix the issue would be to add a document setting to change the text size across the whole document by some factor, so we can always use a value around 14 as base text size.

If we cannot do that, then we could make sure the interface never scales the text in the Edit Text popup, so it’s always displayed as some legible font size (could be tuned in preferences). If we do this, we’ll lose information on relative font size for text that contains different font sizes. But that’s an edge case to me, I rarely use this, so we could have an option to re-enable “relative font size” preview when we really need this. Besides, we only need “relative font size” preview, not “absolute font size” preview, which means the smallest font size could be auto-adjusted to a minimum legible font size anyway.

In fact, since I rarely use the multi-size feature, I find it complicated to have to select the whole text to change the font size each time (same applies to font family, etc.). We could have a “uniform edit” mode when the whole text gets the same font family, size and properties like bold or colors. This covers 90% of the cases and would make editing much faster. When uniform mode is active, we know that we don’t care about relative font sizes, so we could also disable font size previewing and just use a standard legible font size for editing (tunable in settings).

Finally, user could have a setting to manually scale the text edit size as last resort. With auto-scaling the minimum font size to a legible size, it probably won’t be needed, but at least it would allow user to always get a satisfying font size in all situations. Ctrl+mouse wheel should be shortcut to do that quickly.

To sum-up:

  • in most cases, I just need uniform text properties, in which case you can display text at some standard legible font size, as in most editors
  • in edge cases where you need heterogeneous font sizes, you could enable relative font size preview, but still auto-scale the whole thing so the smallest font size is still legible

Bonus: I saw an experimental third-party plugin to edit text live in WYSIWYG fashion: Lazy Text Tool(Prototype) – A plugin that helps you type
This should also fix the issue as the font size I chose is legible in the document, so it should be legible while editing too. I haven’t tried it yet.

2

Hey, I agree this is a pain, I hit this issue so much since this text tool exist.

It works if you go into menu “Image’→"Scale Image to New Size” , check “Adjust print size separately”, put the Resolution around 200 to 300 Pixels/inch (it shouldn’t affect your Pixel Dimension). Then close the document and reopen it, then make a new text box on the document. Only new text boxes will be affected; your previous text box will get a scaling factor to be “corrected” and will remain the same size. This is an extreme workaround, but necessary once someone works with text and Krita.

3

Thanks, it worked and I didn’t have to close and reopen the document. But I had to create new text indeed. I halved the ppi yet the text became around 4x bigger with the same font size, not sure why (maybe I started changing ppi earlier?)

I had other issues remaining such as the lack of auto-wraparound (Wrap-around mode for the text tool?), so I decided to finish drawing in Krita, export my comic strip and add the text in Inkscape, using linked image so I can still update the drawing later if needed.

It works fine, although it’s difficult to adjust the bubble in Krita without knowing in advance how the text will look like. I may have to draw the bubble in Inkscape eventually, although I don’t need vector bubbles.

Note: I also tested Lazy Text Tool but it was too unstable, unexpectedly moving my text away.

4

Yes, I also use Inkscape + Krita for my comic, since 9 years :slight_smile: It requires effort I well know to plan the text separately.

5

Oh, I saw some of your drawings on Krita Christmas promotional art! Good to know it’s a tried-and-tested method. Inkscape actually uses uniform font properties (and also auto-wrap with a simple handle to drag) so it’s easy to adjust the size there.

Some comic artists also draw backgrounds more than they need to to cover the case of the smallest bubble possible, then add the bubble + text separately (I suppose comic graphics editors have a special template to generate various kinds of bullets very fast; so maybe vector is not that bad in this case as stretching will not make it blurry). It’s also useful if you export your work in different languages, so the Japanese version can use vertical bubbles for instance.

6

OMG, yes please. I was literally just looking EVERYWHERE how to fit text into a specific “dimension” and cannot find anything. I just have to use trial and error in the edit text field and go back and forth to see if it fits. Even basic word wrapping would be nice. Now that I see this request here, I know why I cannot figure it out. It doesn’t exist. LOL. PS I am a Krita noob as well as Art Software noob in general. I am on day 5 learning Krita. So far not too hard to figure out. Thank goodness. But yeah, scaling, line spacing, word wrapping in “article format”, not sure what that is called. Basically, fitting text in a custom area.

7

I guess I’m a bit of a techno-wording noob as I got the gist of this but not all the technical terminology. But I agree (I think) about how hard it currently is to write text in comic style speech bubbles with that separate pop up box.
When I first started using Krita a few years ago (V3 I think?), it would type straight onto the canvas so I could see when to start a new line and make it fit inside the bubble. When it updated there was then the separate text box, which means I have to go back and forth between the box, make adjustments, press OK, close the box, fiddle with the text on canvas, go back into the text box to try stuff out and not really know if they work until I click OK and go back to the canvas to adjust.
The text settings don’t go as small as I need in the box so I manually adjust the whole lot on the canvas using the transform tool, but then when I do, the spacing is all wrong again and I have to go back and forth again with the pop-up text box.

So 1) I was kinda hoping we could get back the simple and easy ‘type straight onto the page’ thing so we can see exactly how it fits in the area it needs to.

Also 2) in the previous version of typing straight onto the page, I could move and adjust the position and edit the text of a single text block (speech bubble), even though all the other text blocks were on the same layer. With the new text pop-up box, it’s nearly impossible adjusting the position of different sentences to match the bubbles. And If I add new text onto the same layer, it gets effected when I try to move other bits of text about.
This means for every separate speech bubble, I need to create a new text layer so any adjustments I make to that particular text don’t apply to the whole rest of the comic page. This makes for a load of layers and makes it difficult to see which bit of text is on what layer.

Sorry this was a bit rambly - I guess to sum it up: It was much easier to control, adjust and edit the previous version of adding text straight onto the canvas, (and adjusting the settings in the Tools tab) before the separate pop-up text edit box.

8

Sorry, this is in part beside the topic, because it mainly addresses the speech-bubble issues.

Krita’s text tool is currently being redesigned, but whether the rendering you want within the text editor will also be taken into account there, I can’t say, I think the focus is more on the rendering capabilities. But what I’ve seen so far in terms of previews is more than just a milestone and should help the text tool to significantly increase usability.

Speech-Bubbles:
If you were satisfied with the somewhat limited possibilities of the arrows for the speech bubbles of “Rogudator’s Speech Bubble Generator”, then this might be a temporary solution for the time until an interface in your sense is available. There, the speech bubbles are adjusted to the text you type, but you are stuck with the bubbles and arrows provided by the plugin.

The plugin on Krita-Artists:

On GitHub:

A video about it on YouTube:

Michelist

9

Oh, I didn’t know it used to have direct editing!

My original proposal was about improving the scaling in the popup, but WYSIWYG editing would also fix the issue so maybe that would deserve its own proposal. It seems that features like word wrap, text fit shape (does it include auto-resize?), and even smart speech bubbles are in discussion according to Text box is awful, although it’s not clear whether they intend to restore WYSIWYG editing.

10

Wow that’s a cool plugin!

In fact, if there was an option to only draw text without the speech bubble/balloon, that would make a nice generator for wrapped text at uniform scale! (you can delete the bubble manually from the vector layer anyway)

Although it doesn’t edit text created once and only create new instances, so if you want to rescale the text later, you’ll still have to go through the text popup…

In the particular case of comic strips where you know the font size in advance though, it may increase productivity a lot! I’ll try it!