Inkscape 04: Creating Text

hi there my name is Katie Bart's from sewing Singh Kham and I'd like to welcome you to my Inkscape extreme beginning tutorials today's tutorial deals with creating text [Music] if all we start working with text today we want to make sure our workspace is set up just in a nice organized fashion and the first tutorial if you haven't seen that yet we'll go ahead and show you how to go ahead and do that so let me go ahead very quickly and set this up I'm gonna go to the file menu click on document properties and just for simplicity sake let's go ahead and display our units in inches on our page I'm going to use a US letter and I'm going to put it in landscape mode just for a change of pace here and then I'm going to go ahead and leave this show page border on so that when I close this window you can actually see the page border itself now what we also want to go ahead and open up our strokes and edits gradients tool and that will open up in the properties window on the right-hand side as well as our align and distribute objects properties window so these are just two that I always have open all the time when I'm working with it because I'm in and out changing the outlines or strokes of things I'm lining things up vertically and horizontally and you will add and subtract properties to this particular window over here as we go along so to zoom in on this particular page it's kind of small to write text on so I'm going to go ahead and click my the scroll button on my mouse as I hold down the control key so control on the keyboard and then you can scroll your scroll wheel on your mouse to zoom in and out and then the next thing I'd like to do is kind of move this page over a little bit so I'm actually working on the page and again the easiest way to do that is to hold the spacebar on your keyboard while you're clicking your left mouse button and dragging that over to the area of work all right so we can the edge of our pages right here to create a font what you're going to do is on the toolbar on the left hand side you're going to click the Create and edit text objects you'll see the shortcut key is f8 simply click on that and when you move your mouse into the workspace you'll see that there's a letter A attached to your pointer that's that you know you're working with the text tool all you need to do is simply click and start typing from your keyboard I'm just go ahead and type the word dream now before I make any changes to this particular text here I want to point out that the toolbar across the top it's only active when this text tool here is selected again if I choose a different tool from the toolbar if I choose the zoom tool you'll see the zoom tools will be featured here so if I want to see and work with text properties I have to have this text tool selected and then those properties are available it shows you what font you're using if it's normal bold italic underline you know bold condensed etc it will also show you to show you your font size and then a bunch of other properties that we'll be talking about through the text series of text tutorials this would be your justification buttons left center right and full justify if we're going to you know type the paragraphs so for simplicity sake right here let's just go ahead and leave this text but I want to point out is if you're going to change anything with the text you have to have this text tool selected and you have to highlight the text that you want to be affected so basically you're telling the computer exactly which text you're going to apply certain of properties to for example if I want to come up here and I want to choose a different font I can click down on this down arrow and maybe choose bodine ebdb t all right so if I select that that selected if I would have only selected the last two characters you can actually change the font of those last two characters because that's all that's selected so it's very important to click and drag to highlight the font or the letters that you want to be affected control-z will take your text back to its original position and font etc I also want to introduce you now that we have this selected to this tee button up here it's going to show another properties button over on the right-hand side that allows you and also to choose your font your justifications if you click on text here it will let you text type in different text right and as we click apply you can see it says dream again variants are going to be or you can set superscript subscript and unique features with capital letters etc so you can come in here and play with this but I wanted to point out if you're working with a certain font more often than not and you find yourself always changing to that font you can select it from this list and once you select the font and the font size from this list all you need to do is select set as default and you'll see once you select that as a default it Gray's out to let you know that that has changed now every time I open Inkscape my default font will be an Arial font forty-eight points and when I start typing that's exactly the text it's going to be we'll go ahead and X out of that window in the properties area so that we just have the align and distribute and fill in stroke tabs left open here and we want to talk about spell check so if I just go ahead and flip these two letters here and I was going to be typing dream again but dream you know is misspelled you might not know that if you're typing a paragraph you can just glance over it quickly if you again simply click and drag over a font or the letter or the word that you want to check and if you right-click on that you will see check spelling so check spelling is going to be an option right here when you select that once again it's going to open a properties window and because we have that one word selected it's automatically gonna bring up words that it thinks we might want and dream here is what we want it to be so we simply click on that select accept and that very quickly changed that particular word to correct spelling now let's go ahead and change a couple of these words now I'm going to go ahead and do dream again and I'm going to change the I and the a all right so we have two words that are misspelled or I can right-click on the fonts again and check spelling and it doesn't know what words I have selected because there is anything highlighted so I would go ahead and select this start button when I click start it's going to go through the entire document and check the spelling and you have the option to ignore it completely or just ignore it one time or to actually change the spelling so let's go ahead and click on dream select accept and then it knows that this is misspelled it's sort of it's encased in red here and there's the correct spelling so I will accept that and then we are complete so when you're done once again you can click the X in the upper right hand corner to close that property window out to size your text is just like choosing a font you want to make sure that you select the text that you want to change the size of and then you can come here to this font size drop-down and these are in points just an FYI 72 points is one inch all right so you can subtract that and it would be 36 would be half an inch and 18 would be a quarter-inch etc all the way down so you can think of 72 points is one inch 144 is going to be 2 inches just hunting give you a rough idea on on sizing later as we get through tutorials you'll learn how to pull up grids on your screen so you can actually get the exact size that you need but for this particular sample let's go ahead and change this to 24 all right so I only changed the word that I had highlighted you can also once you choose the selection tool again you can actually click and drag to size the text so you can simply click and drag and if you see if I don't constrain that text I don't I won't have proportional text so what I like to do is press ctrl + Shift + draw from the center out that will again constrain the proportions height to width and then you can resize your font by dragging I'm gonna go ahead and zoom out here a little bit because my she is 8 half by 11 you can see that's fairly large but maybe you're making a poster or a sign or something you can very quickly create some fun and fancy text now if I were to go back to the text tool select that and I highlight the word dream right from the 48 points that it was originally it is now if we look at the font size up here a little over a hundred and thirteen points so you can always go back and check your point size on these objects to see what they have been changed to if you want to so from our 24 point we change the word again - it is now almost 57 points in size alright so that's fun ok let's take another look at the properties bar here for the text so I need to make sure again that the text tool here is selected and maybe I wanted to change the spacing of the word dream let me go ahead and just remove I'm just gonna remove and delete the word again we'll just concentrate on this word dream here if I need to change the spacing between the letters of this word again it's always a better habit to highlight and let the computer know what text you specifically are working with first we can go up to the tool bar and on the toolbar there is an option here for spacing between letters and if I click the up arrow you will see that the spacing is increased this is wonderful to give you a nice effect maybe you wanted two rows of characters one has a longer word in it and you want it to be the same length you have the capability now of stretching or decreasing the spacing between those letters to make that work we also have the capability of changing our vertical spacing so maybe I wanted that to be more of a subscript type character let's take a look up here on this tool right here it says vertical shift so we can actually change the vertical shift of that so maybe you wanted your letters to go up and down like a wave you could just easily change that vertical shift and to go back to regular again or to undo our process that we just did just press control Z and we're back here at the beginning let's say we want to change colors of our font this is one of the reasons why I like to have this fill and Stroke properties window open here because I have the capability of changing or filling with a font color and then one of the easiest ways to do that and we're going to get back to this window here in just a moment is to use this swatches here on the bottom of your screen so let's go ahead and choose up a nice blue color so if I choose that for a fill alright I want to take you back up to the fill and Stroke properties and introduce you to this HSL tab now most of you I think yours defaults to RGB and if you're printing and want to do it too in a printing press type situation they we have their CMYK capabilities but I really like using this HSL tab stands for hue saturation levels and the area here for our alpha channel which deals with transparency and the nice thing about that is if I have a color here I really like and I add an outline or what they call a stroke in Inkscape to this particular text I can increase or decrease the levels which changes it to a darker if I slide it to the left you can see the word dream is turning darker and if I slide it to the right I have the capability of changing that particular color to be lighter and what's nice about that is you stay in the color family that you're working with it doesn't change out of that color family for example if I chose a different blue I have more of a royal blue here on the screen it's gonna stay within that royal blue family and just make it lighter or darker so all your colors are gonna seamlessly go together alright the hue we'll talk about another time saturation this takes you from having color to actually removing color so you can see I have more gray hair so I don't have any color in there I've totally taken the saturation out and here I've added color back and accidentally clicked on the red at the same time but you can see that again if I slide this saturation to the left it removes some of the color and sliding it to the right gives it more saturation the stroke capability so just in in review again choosing a color from the swatches down below and then you can fine-tune your colors by moving the sliders here in the HSL tab right the stroke itself is what we call an outline I mean we know it as an outline but Inkscape calls it a stroke and if we want to add a stroke what we are going to do is go to stroke paint here and we're going to go ahead and add a stroke by selecting flat color and if I want to remove this text for example I can come over here to this stroke paint tab in the fill and stroke properties and I can click on this no paint and that can remove that the outline okay or the stroke is it calls it again in Inkscape and if I add that back it's going to take the default color but you can actually change the color that you want so for example I wanted to make it the font blue but every time I click on a color you can see it's only changing the fill all right so to change the actual outline of the object what I'd like you to learn and remember is to hold the shift key hold the shift key on your keyboard you can see over here in the lower left hand corner it says fill his green and the stroke is black if I hold my shift key on the keyboard and then I select a color that modifies the outlines remember stroke begins with the letter S and shift begins with the letter s so to add a stroke to an object it's a lot easier to hold the shift key than to worry about which button over here I have to press in the properties window so maybe I wasn't really liking that particular color let's go ahead and again hold our shift key on our keyboard and we'll take the green here a little bit darker I like that much better so ctrl and rolling the scroll on your scroll wheel on your mouse will zoom out holding the spacebar while you click and drag your screen will allow you to pan the screen very very easily and if I want to remove an outline scroll the swatches here all the way to the left and the very first button you see on the swatches says none but what key do I have to press to remove or work with strokes yes the shift key so if I hold the shift key down click on the X I can remove the stroke on this letter but I have to have it selected first I didn't have it selected so let me hold shift click on the X so shift X and it removed the stroke the last thing I want to point out to you let me hold my spacebar and move my workspace back to the center here is I now need to make this a vector let's say I wanted to take this into my cutting program or my digital program and complete this text plain text is not going to work for example if I take this text and I you know click over here I don't get those nodes that I was talking about the other day even if with my select tool when I click on it with the Select tool all I get is the sizing handles I click again I get the rotation handles and the skew handles I don't get those fancy nodes or I can change the text and know that it is a true vector so once we have the text the way we want it right you'll select it go up to your path menu and select object to path now if I click off of it and I select the nodes tool and then select on my object you can see each object now let me zoom in on that each character is now an object that I can work with individually and modify how it how it looks on the screen if I want some drippy looking text here Halloween is coming here shortly so we can create some drippy looking text all right but you can modify it now that we have nodes in your cutter or your digitizing the software will be able to know how to create this because it has those nodes and internally it creates the characters or a cutting file or an embroidery file based off where the nodes are right so it knows from here to here you're going to possibly have a running stitch or from here this node to this node you may have a satin stitch or a fill stitch so it knows what direction to create those you know instructions in either the cutting program or the digitizing program so let me zoom out here really quick again I'm gonna press ctrl-z a few times to take me back to my original text and again I went back too far because I clicked with my node tool and there are no nodes available so use your select tool cup - path object to path now when I select the nodes tool and I click on a character you can see that they're all individual one another thing I want to point out is if you're not going to be manipulating or splitting these apart in your cutting or digitizing software any further it's just as easy to go ahead and select this text right here and prepare it appropriately for digitizing or cutting and to do that what we need to do is ungroup the text so we're going to ungroup it and when we select the text and we select the ungroup button right here it says ungroup selected groups we now have the capability to weld these letters together so they act as one unit is right now they're each individual alright and I may not want that in my other programs that I'm working with my cutting programs are not because it's going to cut each character maybe individually versus you want it to continue to cut the whole word and dream and not jump down here to something else and come back up to the a and then go back down and you know cut a flower or digitize a flower and come back to the letter M we want to treat this as a unit in our other applications so the best way to do that again is to select the text we went to ungroup now we're going to go back to path and we're going to use the Union command Union weld they're the same effect in any program they just might you know may have different terminology but when I select Union what it did now is it made each individual character this whole thing now is one unit and I can move it all individually and if I go to the nodes tool you can see that now not one character has nodes to work with it it has the whole word so if I were to digitize this it knows to do the word the whole entire word dream like I said and not do the letter D and then come down here and do something on the second line and then come back up and do the letter R and because if it if it's reading this from left right there might be another picture of something right here that it would go down too and then come back up and do the ei back down em so it'll automatically digitize these letters in one fell swoop or cut these letters in one fell swoop so hopefully that gave you just a real basic introduction to text we have several series of working with text here we're going to show you how to work on a path and how to put text into a frame well also in future tutorials show you how to break these letters apart and split them so that you can put other words within there we'll show you how to actually apply text to a shape so we've got some fun things to do but I want you to go ahead and play around with creating text getting used to this text tool again and highlighting and the text before you change any properties using the text properties window spell check etc and the last point I want to make before I leave before I forget is once this has been ungrouped and welded or unified together with the Union command here in Inkscape you cannot edit that text any further and what I mean by that is I can't take this and highlight the letter D see I I just it just won't let me go in there and put the word scream instead of dream alright so make sure before you unify your text that it is exactly the way you want it to be otherwise you'll end up recreating the whole thing over again which isn't always a bad idea to get some practice working with text but once your Yunnan unionize it it is set in stone until you take it to your other applications right so I want to thank you for joining me today in Inkscape creating text and I often want you to visit my website sewing scene calm also don't forget to subscribe to this channel and go ahead and click little Bell icon to share it it's the more people we can get following the easier it is to get stay motivated to create more wonderful tutorials like this I'm going to start doing some really fun stuff so thank you

Channel: SewingScene

Views: 644

Keywords: Katie Bartz, SewingScene, Sewing Scene, Sewing, Inkscape, Inkscape Tutorials, Inkscape Beginner Tutorials, Beginning Digitizing, Machine Embroidery, Sillhouette Cutter, Cricut Cutter, Design Space

Id: 2yMc9MKpbVc

Length: 27min 46sec (1666 seconds)

Published: Tue Sep 11 2018