| www.belightsoft.com/composer | Start of Help > Editing Business Cards |
The most of the text formatting tools are located on the Text tab of the Inspector window (menu: Window > Inspector > Text).
Some operations common to different objects are described in Basic Operations on Objects.
Each text field features predetermined type (for example, Company, Phone, etc.). The text consists of the main field and label (is attached to specified fields like "Phone").
To add a text field:
To change the text type or its label, go to the Text tab of the Inspector window.
The application is fully integrated with the Apple Address Book. That is the default personal data source to fill text fields. The main field, used to determine the person, is "Name". If you don't want to use auto-filling when creating new texts, toggle this check off in the Preferences dialog.
To modify text:
double-click on it. The Text tab of the Inspector window lets modify text properties (field type, alignment, text color, background color, shadow, etc.).
Text positioning is determined by the text box boundary. The box size can be modified with the mouse. When text field is selected, its box is visible as a blue frame.
Text can be rotated, for this, select the text box and use the rotate slider or enter the angle value (in degrees) on the Geometry tab of Inspector.
When the card is ready, it is possible to change the person (it implies that personal information in all fields will be changed). For this, the Change Person dialog is used.
When creating name badges and such type of cards you may need to use automatically changeable text fields (such as Counters). You can find information concerning this in Counters and Data from a text file.
To delete a text field:
select it and press the Delete key.
To change text color:
• Select a text box and click the Text color button on the Text tab of Inspector.
or
• Select a piece of text, then open the Color panel (Cmd-Shift-C or the Color button on the toolbar) and choose a new color.
To set the background color for the text:
select a text box, open the Fill & Shadow tab in Inspector (menu: Window > Inspector > Fill & Shadow), check the Fill checkbox and select color after clicking the Color button nearby.
To add a color frame around text:
select the text box, then open the Fill & Shadow tab in Inspector, set the Line checkbox and finally select a color.
To add a shadow:
set the Shadow checkbox and set the shadow color. The distance
to the object, angle and blur can be also adjusted using corresponding controls.
To change the text font:
use the Font system panel. To open it, click the Fonts toolbar button or press Cmd-T.
To convert text to a vector image, select the text, open its context menu and choose Convert text to Image. To the converted text, you can apply graphic effects that do not work with text (Core Image filters, flipping, etc.).
You can change the default spacing value of a text block to the one you need in the Spacing section on the Text tab of Inspector.
Between Characters - the spacing between characters; can be applied to the whole selected text box, to the selected part of text or to a single word.
Between Lines - the spacing between lines, can be applied to
the whole selected text box or to a selected part of the text.
Before Paragraph - the space before the selected paragraph.
To check spelling, use the Edit > Spelling menu.