Inkscape Explained: Text, Word Formatting and Installing Fonts

this is knit with logos by Nick comm and in this episode of Inkscape explained I'm going to be going over text and wording in formatting text and installing fonts and all the different things you can do with text and wording in Inkscape so let me close out of this and get started here in xscape if you notice I already have these windows open let me just close out of them so I could show you if you'd like to follow along with what I'm doing this is the align and distribute menu up here and then this is the edit objects colors gradients and Stroke menu right here and I like to work with these two menus open at all times so let's get started with some text so let me just make sure I'm zoomed in okay we'll get started with some text we've got our text tool over here to the left create an edit text objects you click on that and if you notice here my defaults are set to two use this font this text dryer Advent or however it's pronounced I have the default size of 40 and I have it set it bold and aligned to the left so if you want to set defaults for yourself you can set them right here but make sure you do it before you type any text in because if you type text in like this then you go and change the font in the size it's not going to save it as a default and there's another way to save your default settings as well I'll be going over that shortly so I'm just going to create some random text here a couple of lines of a random text and [Music] let's see what we can do with this now so we from the menu here we got our fonts you go to this drop-down to pick the font I don't like using this because it's kind of like it's kind of like it's hard to go through there and sometimes it could be a little slow if you have a slower computer I like to use the text editor up here which will be going over that in just a minute so we could choose the size these preset sizes over here or you can just type in a manual size like let's say I wanted to use something like 44.5 you can do that as well bold italics this depends on the type of font you're using some fonts that you that you downloaded install they won't have bold and italics variations but this one does so over here this is typical like something you'd see in Microsoft Word you know you can align it you can Center it put it to the right or off to the left over here toggle superscript that makes it a little smaller I guess I'm not really sure I've never really used that much same thing over here toggle subscript does the same thing but just it looks like if you notice this little square right here this little node it tells you where it's aligned so when I click that one it's at the top left but when I click this one toggle superscript this is at the bottom left so I'm not sure what the difference between those is but it's not really useful in my experience so these are useful right here this one right here spacing between lines so we got two lines of text here I could just click up on click up on this arrow and put some space between those lines like that and that's pretty useful and here's another one I like as well spacing between letters you just click up on that arrow and you could space out the letters like that make them really far apart or you could even make them close together like that so that's what you do with that this one here spacing between words that's pretty much it works how you would think it would work it increases the spaces between the words just like that you notice the space growing between those words or you could just manually type in a number like 100 instead of sitting there holding that arrow up for however long it takes so let me undo that this one right here horizontal kerning now this works relative to wherever you put the cursor so if I put the cursor right here between the letter e and X and where was I and I press up on that it's going to increase the spacing between those two letters which honestly I've never really had much of a use for that but it's there if you want to use it and likewise you can hold down and it increases them I mean it decreases the spacing like that so what we have next over here is vertical spacing this works the same way but on the vertical axis you can bring the text the ability to bring the X T lower than the TE or you can bring the X T higher than the TE so that's there if you want to use that as well again that's not something I use very often but there it is and this one here character rotation this rotates the character around like that which I don't know I don't really use that much either if I want to edit the tech if I want to rotate letters like that what I'll do is I'll convert them to a path I'll show you I'll convert them to a path I'll go to path object to path and then I'll break them apart I mean I'll actually ungroup them by clicking the young group button and then you can click on them and edit them and rotate them around oops you could rotate them around individually that's how I like to do that but if you want to do that through the text editor knock yourself out so okay so let me go back to the text tool we have the rotation and this here this is pretty cool here vertical text you could just change this to vertical you click on that and now it's vertical text and that's that's pretty cool I use that sometime so let me undo that and that's everything in the text toolbar up here but there's more to know about text so let me go back to the Select tool and I'll click on this button right here this is a view and select font family font size and other text properties this is the text editor up here I like this window a lot I deal with this mainly instead of like playing around with in the toolbar and you could also get to it over here with text text and font or you could just use the control key board shortcuts like I used like I like to do shift ctrl and T and here's where you could pick fonts and I find this really really useful because what I like to do when I'm designing something like a logo or something like that if I want to find the right file just click on the click on one of these fonts and it shows you a preview here and I'll click on it I'll just press up on the arrow key I'll keep pressing up just browse through the fonts and see what looks cool what works what doesn't and it's um I know that's how I like to pick fonts that's a pretty cool use for right there and over here you got your style normal italic bold this is pretty much all the stuff that's in the text toolbar and I should probably go back to that all the stuff in the text toolbar is also over here well except for these items right here line spacing font size and again this is a other way you could set the default what I was saying earlier about setting the default you can pick it a font style a layout and a size and you could set it as default or what I'm going to leave that as it is because I like my defaults as they were so let me close out of that let me go back to the Select tool and let's talk about the the text drop-down menu up here text and font we just went over that SVG font editor I'm not sure I don't know much about this this looks like an entirely new world than I'm used to this is I'm not I've never really I've never created a font or anything like that I've created custom lettering for logos and stuff but never created the font files or anything but I assume this is what you can do with this tool if you learn how to use it but I don't know how to use that I haven't found much documentation about it but it's there if you want to experiment with it and hear glyphs as well similarly I'm really not sure what this works as I've never really had a use for that either but it's there if you want to look it up and the rest of these these are all pretty self-explanatory put on path now this is interesting so let me show you an example of this I'm just going to duplicate this and I'm going to put this all in one line like that and let's say I want to take this text and put it in a circle so I'm going to create a circle like that now I take this text and then I'll hold shift and click on the circle and I'll go to text put on path and it puts the text around the shape of the circle and that'll work with any other shape it'll work with the square or a polygon or or any lips or anything like that so in this example I just used a circle now if I want to bring that text around so sitting on top I'm going to click on the circle not the text don't click on the text click on the circle itself and then click on it again to get the rotation handles and you could rotate the text around like that and what's cool about this is you could even edit the text while it's on the circle like that so I'll go to the text tool and I'll click on the text and we can edit this we could change the style or change the size I could change this to like a 40 or something I could change the spacing between the letters like that that's pretty cool and this all works the same way as it normally does when it's on the path so let me go back to the Select tool I'm going to click on this circle now and I'm going to hold ctrl and shift and scale this down to show you you notice that as the small as this the circle gets smaller the text doesn't get smaller remains the same size so this is something to keep in mind if you're ever creating like a logo or something that uses text in the form of a circle so now let's say I want these two I want the the start and the end of the text to align to sit on the same horizontal plane well I'll just click on the circle again to get the rotation handles and just rotate this around and what I like to do is it's probably a better way to do this I'm not sure but what I've in the habit of doing is I'll go up here to these little these little measurement tools and I'll click and drag the pull down a guide like that and I'll put it somewhere near the edge of the two items and then I'll just zoom in a few times by pressing plus in the keyboard and I can rotate this circle around until it looks like they're both sitting close equally close to the horizontal guide right there and then once you're done you could hover over the hover your cursor over the guide till it turns red press Delete on the keyboard okay now one thing to keep in mind is that when you have this text here the shape of this text is reliant on this circle so if you take that circle and you delete that you just lost the shape of the text what you just had so again if you move the circle around the text is going to come with it and if you move the text the circle doesn't move but if you move the circle the text will move so that's one thing to keep in mind if you ever want to see how it looks without this red circle well I let me back up for a second if you want to finalize this text you can click on the text itself and go to path object to path and now it's no longer text now it's in now its paths with individual nodes like a typical vector so and then you could take this and delete it and there's your text but if you'd like to keep it a text object while still on the circle here what you could do is you can click on this charcoal and you could turn off the fill by clicking the X and you'll be able to get a glimpse of how it looks without you know that fill color in the way so just once you're done make sure you fill it back in with the color otherwise you won't be able to click on it again like let me show you it now has no fill and no stroke that circle so I'll click off of that you notice I can't click on it it's gone I have to grab it by clicking and dragging over that entire area and then it'll grab that invisible circle and the text and I'll have to hold shift and click on the text to deselect it and then I could turn that back to being red so that's how you could put text going around the outside of a circle if you want to make this text going around the inside of the circle what you could do is let me just make this a little bigger let's this won't work what I'll do is I'll click on the circle and I'll click the button right here that says flip selected objects vertically and there it is now it's going on the inside of the circle so let me actually lower that beneath the text there we go and again you can click on this again rotate it around make it look however you'd like and if you want to remove the text from the path you can just go to text remove from path like that and that's uh that's pretty much how that works let me fix the spacing of that and let me see what's next here text flow into frame this is pretty useful let me generate a bunch of text here I'm going to go to extensions text and where is it lorem ipsum they're just going to generate a couple of paragraphs of this lorem ipsum gibberish and close out of that so let's say you have like let's say you're designing like a flyer or a brochure or something and you have all of this copy here like the client sends you this copy and this needs to be what's in the brochure well what you could do is um let me create a rectangle let's say this is one of the panels of the brochure right here right this includes like we'll just pretend that there's a bleed in a safe area and everything what you could do is you could take this text actually let me make this a little bigger you take this text I'm going to raise it to the top I'll hold shift and click on that rectangle and go to text flow into frame and it flows the text into the shape of that object which is really useful I use that often myself let me undo that another thing you could do which is pretty cool let me bring down the size of this you could use this as multiples like let me make a few copies of this I'll make like four copies space them out evenly I don't know what happened at this window and put that back okay so they're spaced out evenly and I'll unify them together so it's one object I'll go to path Union right and I'll take the text and again just make sure it's race to the top and I'll hold shift and click on these panels right here and go to text flow into frame and that's pretty cool it flows it into all of that and one thing you have to be mindful of if you notice here some of the text got cut off because the box the object was too small so I'm going to take this object and make it a little bigger so the rest of the text flows in there so whenever you're doing this just make sure to make the rectangle or whatever object it is you're using much bigger than what you think the volume of text will be so and again to remove that we can click on the text and just go to text unload and there you go it's back to being regular text like that and this works with other shapes you could do stuff like other than a square or rectangle you can use a circle like that let me raise that to the top go to text put on path oops note wrong thing text flow into frame and you can put the text in the shape of the circle which is pretty cool now you take that circle and turn off the fill and we have text in the shape of that ellipse like that which is a that's pretty cool so let me delete all of that and let me see what's next here we go to text convert to text I have no idea what this is I think like from what it sounds like it could take a text object I mean take a vector object and convert it to text which I have no idea how that would work and I tried searching for this I couldn't find any information about this tool but maybe I didn't look hard enough so I'll just skip that for now remove manual Kernes okay so let me take this object here this text object and I'll go back to the text tool I'll put the cursor between those letters I'll increase the curse the kerning or horizontal counting like that and then we can go to text remove manual currents and it'll put it back to where it was so that's pretty self-explanatory check spelling it's a spell checker pretty self-explanatory so like let's say I still that is I accidentally hit a D at the end there if I go to text check spelling it'll show you it'll put a red box around the spelling error and it'll give you options here so that was supposed to be text and then you got different languages to choose from as well I believe texts make it text you can ignore it or you can ignore it one so you could just ignore it in general or you could just click accept and it'll change it so that's good thing to do like when you're designing like a flyer and there's a lot of wording and before you do that just make sure to go to text and run a spellcheck because sometimes when clients send you things like they'll have typos in there and their copy and stuff so it's good to have that spell checking tool okay so what else can we do with text well um let me duplicate this I'm going to right click that and go to duplicate and let's say I want to like bend to the path like bend the text and give it different shapes well in order to do that I'm going to have to convert it to a path first I'll go to path object to path and then I'll go to path path effect editor and from the drop-down I'll choose Bend I'll click on add and it'll give me Bend and I'll click on the Edit on canvas tool and it's going to give me this green line striking through the text so I can just click on that green line and change the shape of it and the text will take the form of however I shape that line which is a pretty cool to have so that's one way you could edit text let me remove that also you can go to I know I did a tutorial about this a while back but I'll just show you again envelope deformation click Add and then you have all these different paths you could edit here you got the top right bottom and left when you zoom in to show you I'll click on the top path and it'll give you this line going to this green line going across the top you can click and drag on that and that gives it kind of like a a bridge effect I guess you can call it like an arched text type of thing and you could edit the bottom path as well do something similar pull that down and then you got the right and the left hand side which is pretty self-explanatory I'm just going to move that note up a bit you can pull that line out like that and this starts to get a little wacky you do that I'll edit that like that and alright yeah so there's that I'll finalize that by going to path object to path close out of the path effect editor and let's say if you ever wanted to create text like that for whatever reason now you know so I'm trying to think what else I could explain when it comes to text Oh fonts yeah I wanted to talk about fonts a bit to install fonts I get this question a lot from you guys a lot of you asked me like how do you install a font into Inkscape well how it works is you don't install a font into Inkscape you would install the font into your system into your operating system and then the next time you open up Inkscape it'll recognize that font in the directory so let me minimize the window here and show you like I just downloaded this font errors example whenever you download a font online they usually give you a dot zip file so I click on this dot zip file and I got all of the different variations of the open sans font here open sans bold I'll click on that and what you're looking for is a dot TTF file either dot TTFN or dot OTF and when you open it up you're going to get this window right here and this is this is pretty much the same on Windows as it is on Linux so if you're using Windows don't worry that that this will be any different with Mac I'm not really sure I don't have much experience with Mac but once you open up the file you can just click install and it will install that font into your system and you'll want to go through and get all the variations like here's the bold italic variation the extra bold variation that's pretty nice I'm actually to install that the extra bold variation and you have you have to click install for each one of them open sans italics and you got all your variations there which is pretty self-explanatory so let me close out of that and now if I go to tink scape whoops if I go back into Inkscape and I go looking for that font it's not going to be there I just installed open sans Extra Bold it's not there I mean I have the other open sans from that I use previously but it's not going to be there like I said you have to close out of Inkscape and reopen it again so let me um let me close out everything scape close without saving opening scape backup we're basically restarting Inkscape and when we restart it that font will be there now or it should be anyway sexed open sands ultra bold there it is so that's how you can install new fonts to use for Inkscape and what's cool is once you install that font you'll have it everywhere on your system you know you'll you'll be able to use it in like word processors you'll be able to use it in and any other any other application where you need to use text and one final thing I'd like to point out is that when you're creating something like let's say you created a logo right and like let's say for whatever reason this is your logo here right this is finished this is your logo if you save this file as a dot SVG or a dot PDF or a dot anything if you save this in any kind of editable file and you send it to somebody else like another computer not another computer if you send it to somebody else or you send it to yourself using another computer if you go to open up this file on that computer and you don't have this font installed whatever application you're using is going to default into some other fonts so if you ever want to UM send in you if you ever want to send this file over to somebody to ensure that it stays this text stays in this style what you can do is just convert it to a path first you just go to path object to path and now it's no longer a text object it's now vectors it's pets paths so and that will ensure that this will open the same on every other machine whether or not they have this font installed so that pretty much covers it for using text with Inkscape if you have any questions let me know and as always thank you for watching [Music] yeah [Music] yeah [Music]

Channel: Logos By Nick

Views: 93,061

Keywords: inkscape, learn inkscape, inkscape tutorial, inkscape for beginners, inkscape text, inkscape fonts, inkscape formatting, inkscape explained, vector design, learn vector design

Id: n512yj9dJiw

Length: 23min 15sec (1395 seconds)

Published: Fri Dec 02 2016