Text Tool Thread

Develop Artists Feedback & Testing
281

So I tried the new text tool. And I think it is awesome to be able to edit the text on the canvas directly.

However I wanted to put the text on Vector shapes /paths and it is really confusing, at least for me.

Is it correct, that my text has to be on the same layer as the shape to put it onto the path?

I wanted to have my shapes on an other vector layer, so that I could hide them, but I guess not.

Is there a way to edit my shapes after I put a text on it?

I had to set the text to in-line, to extract the shapes, to be able to edit it. And afterwards I have to set the text to predefined If I want to add it back onto the shape. That is really cumbersome… or did I miss a checkbox for hiding my paths?

When using the on the fly text manipulation, and trying to move the text I always click the font size modificator. The text indicating the function is also not really readable for the modificators is there a way to configure the size of this text?

And I agree add property should be the first entry in the new docker, not the last so you find it instantly.

I used the second beta btw.

282

That’s correct.

Yes, there is a way to edit your shape after the text is put on the path or within the shape. With the Text Tool selected, click on the text. You should see a small black box off to the side of your text shape/path, that looks like has little sheets of paper. If you click that box, it will turn blue. This will have changed your focus from the text, to the shape the text is on or within. At this stage you may click on the path or shape and manipulate it as you would a vector shape, which means you may make the shape invisible by opening the Tools Docker and setting the Line and Fill options for the shape to “no fill”. When you’re done, click the box (now blue) and it will return you to text editing.

(EDIT) - Missed this bit.

With the Text Tool selected, you can hover the marquee over the line path or over the shape, and then click. This will automatically put the text on either the path or within the shape. You can tell which you’ll end up with, depending on the icon you see before clicking. Here’s what to look for:

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283

Ah that makes sense… after your explanation :grimacing:

Ok so text and path on the same layer :white_check_mark:

That sheets icon is not intuitive, it looks more like a copy icon to me… maybe put an :pencil: Icon there. And add a message, when editing the shape or text​:thinking: (if I didn’t see that either I’m sorry) or you could change the icon every time you toggle that button. Only changing the state does not tell me its function.

I will now with my new knowledge play with the text again. :smiling_face_with_horns:

284

I’ve noticed a discrepancy (or inaccuracy) in the manual for the text tool. The reference manual states “If you have just created a text, a blinking cursor will be visible on the text.” Using Beta 3, this is untrue in the case of text created with a single click for in the insertion point IF that text click creates the new vector layer. Subsequent text object creation on an already-existing vector layer works as described in the manual. It’s KIND of reported as 516006, but I think that’s described wrong (no the steps are correct to reproduce—just the title is a little misleading, since you really can’t create text on a paint layer).

Hmm. And playing around, it just crashed Krita. Lemme see if I can reproduce that.

I can’t reproduce the crash, but I got it to break on a new document. Text on a curve doesn’t appear to play nice with other text objects on the same vector layer. Let me search the bugs. Okay, this appears to be an unreported bug. Reported as 517438. I think this also triggers other bugs, such as being unable to edit stroke attributes, but I have to do more testing. (nope. Unrelated).

285

Over the past few days I’ve been reading up on the history of the “Text Tool” and the user manual, etc. I have a learning curve ahead of me obviously but I was hoping for a quick answer to this question: I have a lot of illustrated pages, with text done in pre-5.3 versions. Am I to understand that there is no backward compatibility to those pages? It didn’t seem like it. Trying to open previously created and saved text didn’t seem to work. I may be missing something but it would be helpful to know more about this as I have a fair amount of upcoming work. I like the new changes, but I’m just wondering about stuff I did before. It seemed like had to retype sentences, paragraphs to get simple changes. Thanks!

286

It is not the answer you are asking for, but to circumvent the need of fully retyping something, you could use a portable version of Krita from pre 5.3 as an alternative to manipulate existing text with that if you need to.
Then you have to start the portable version to adjust older works.

Michelist

287

I can’t speak to your particular use case, and I hate to be the guy that says “you’re not seeing what you’re seeing” but I don’t think that “no” backward compatibility is accurate. I just opened a couple of files in 5.3 β3 with text I created in 5.2, and I was able to modify the text blocks I created with the old tool. Oddly, it wouldn’t let me add more than one space between words (probably something to do with pre-positioned formatting, which was probably the only option with the old tool—when I change it to inline-wrapped, It acts more predictably, but I have to fix the bounding box). Otherwise it seemed to work normally. I could edit text, change the font size, font family, letter spacing, etc.

288

Can’t say I’ve run into any backward compatibility issues yet, either. I just went back through some of my older files, and they all seemed to work fine, though I wasn’t 100% sure they weren’t made with a Nightly Next version that used an updated text field. So, I went back to older release of Krita, which still had us using the popup window to type in, and did some testing. I was able to open that file in the newer version, just fine.

I’m wondering if it may be something tied to a specific font?

289

Ayo, been testing the new text tool for a few days and I’m a little confused. Why are the font selection boxes sometimes grayed out and sometimes not? Why does selecting fonts sometimes just not work? I can’t tell if it’s a bug or a feature.

290

Without being able to see what you were doing, there’s not much to go on. When you say, “font selection boxes”, do mean on the Tool Options docker, the Text Properties Docker (and if it’s this one, which tab on it), or the text field you’ve placed on the canvas? (EDIT) - Also, were you working with text that was placed on a vector path or flowed into a vector shape?

291

Unless those files were made with a Krita < 4.0 (when we switched to SVG), all text objects should just work. It might be however that they are in the old pre-positioned format, in which case you select them and convert them to inline-wrap or pre-formatted.

If it’s neither, I will need a bugreport with an affected file attached.

As someonesane says, this requires a screenshot and also whether you are using krita 5.3 or 6.0 (the UI elements are a little broken in 6.0, and we won’t be able to fix that before the release).

292

Just gave this a go now that 5.3/6 is out! And this is such a life changer! I can’t say enough how grateful I am for this!

I do have a question here though: I’m on MacOS and it doesn’t seem to list all the fonts I have installed. Since all the other applications do, I am wondering how Krita detects the fonts. Maybe it’s doing something different? I see other people mentioned this issue as well.

It’s a bit like it doesn’t access the OS’s font registry correctly.

293

Clicking on elements does nothing most of the time, I can force it by writing the font’s full name but that’s not ideal and is inconsitent anyways.

294

Use Krita 5.3, Krita 6.0 has several major bugs we were unable to fix before release, and this is one of them.

Yeah, that might be it. We are using fontconfig, but it might be that fontconfig is looking at the wrong folders. I don’t have macOS myself, so I’d need to talk with the macOS dev about this… It’d be good if you can make a bug report with, among others, the paths where the missing fonts are located, and whether you are using something akin to adobe fonts or the like, then we can sort of develop a plan.

Thanks!

295

Sure I will! I can install fonts as a resource in the meantime, so it’s not really killing it for me.

296

Tool invocations seem to be activating while editing text. Assuming this wasn’t a problem before because of the external editor for text. For example, I had shift linked to the line tool (like photoshop) and whenever I use the shift key while editing text it switches to the line tool and wipes out my text.

297

There’s a bug report for this, but I am surprised, because I definitely tested against particular case when I initially programmed it. Maybe it crept back in :confused:

298

I like the new Text Tool, and I would really love to see more designs that don’t involve opening modal windows in Krita going further. However, there are several things that I find annoying in the new implementation.

  1. The Font Family dropdown is extremely small, and each item is just too tall. It can fit at most two items, in my case. And I’m using a 4K resolution 27 inch monitor, yet the working area of my dropdown is this, and it’s not resizable:

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    I like the old dropdown layout much more.

  2. I really want a real-time LIVE preview of the font family when I’m browsing the font family dropdown. The old implementation had at least some semblance of it. I did update the text in the modal dialogue box immediately when I hovered over an item in the font family selector. It didn’t update the text on the canvas, however, but a preview in the dialogue textarea was at least something already. The new implementation has none of that, and this saddens me a lot, because I often find myself browsing through fonts, comparing each of them to find the best for the job.

  3. The Text Properties docker is cool because I am really not a fan of modal windows that restrict you from moving on the canvas when configuring something. However, this docker doesn’t seem to provide any indication of whether you have any active text objects to work with. It’s always active and lets you change its settings even if there is zero text on the canvas. That’s very confusing and error-prone. Some people suggested having a hovering docker near the text element to configure it, which I understand may be difficult to implement, but at least the Text Properties docker can be greyed out, or it could grey out all of its inputs when no text object on the canvas is selected.

299

Thank you Wolthera for your amazing work!

Is it possible to add a paragraph (not lines) spacing property? Is there a way to space paragraphs already in SVG?

The Text Properties docker’s scrollbar and the font selector’s scrollbar are almost invisible by default (on GNOME Fedora 43 at least).

When scrolling in the docker with a mouse it is very easy to accidentally change values because the widgets are almost the full width. Maybe there could be a maximum width for the widgets or a larger margin?

300

I’m sure someone has mentioned it already, but here is my 2 cents.

The good: on screen text editing: this is great and very appreciated!
The bad: the rest of the GUI.

The text tool options in the tool options docker is a HUGE list. It almost doesn’t fit the height of my screen.

On top of that, you have a separate text options docker, which is also RIDICULOUSLY huge. There are SEVERAL lines of options when all is expanded, so it uses too much vertical space. And there is simply too much margin. I mean, I get that people use Krita with tablets, but they use it with a stylus, right? Nobody is using Krita with their thumbs? Why is there so much space.

I also noticed that there is no tooltip for buttons like the justify button on the top-right corner. It looks just like a hamburger menu.

It’s only open source software that have this sort of extra-large UI. If you use something else like Affinity, Photopea, DaVinci, etc., the GUI is always compact. I don’t understand why this keeps happening.

As an aside, I noticed that resizing an undocked text options docker in Krita 5.3.0 seem to lag a lot even in a blank document. I needed to undock and resize the text options docker to try to find where to change the color of the text and then I immediately noticed this.

I agree with others that a floating toolbar for basic things like font, font size, italic, bold, and color would be great. GIMP has this, for example. CSP has one even for the transform tool.

As for the color picker missing… Krita is in a dire need to having a single consistent color picker for the entire application instead of each different dialog having a different way to pick the color. I’ve heard the argument that some people like the native picker, but Krita could just have a button in its custom color picker to display the native color picker. I think I have seen 3 different color pickers in Krita already, and there are also at least 2 different ways to select gradients.

For comparison this Affinity’s

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And this is Photopea

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Observe that they use a GUI layout with multiple settings in a single line instead of just one setting per line. Does “Font Size” for example needs to be a full-width widget?