This tool allows you to add
plain and decorative text to your images. It acts as a launching pad for the TextArt engine.
Before you can input text, you need to select a region for the text to go into. You do this by clicking a start
and end point. You then confirm this selection by right-clicking or pressing Enter.
Once you select the region to apply text to, a new layer containing the text will be created and you will be
presented with a dialog box where you can change several parameters; this is the TextArt editor.
Did you know... that all text in Chasys Draw IES is fully re-editable?
Chasys Draw IES is one of the very few image editors that allow you to fully re-edit styled text in existing images.
The TextArt Engine
TextArt is the decorative text engine used by Chasys Draw IES. TextArt supports texturing,
selectable styling and arbitrary rotation, all fully re-editable even after the application has been closed and reopened.
TextArt allows you to work with text within Chasys Draw IES as you would in an advanced word processor, giving you
unmatched flexibility and freedom. TextArt also applies text cosmetics to the rendered text – a series of
image processing operations (one of which is super-sampling) that are performed by the graphics engine on the text to
improve its appearance.
Cosmetics can greatly improve the appearance of text, especially at small font sizes, therefore allowing you to work at
lower resolutions.
Chasys Draw IES Artist accepts formatted content from Microsoft Word and other office
and publishing software. Just copy the content from Word and paste as a new layer in Chasys Draw IES Artist.
See Smart Content Acquisition for more information.
The TextArt Editor
This is the interface through which you manage and edit text in Chasys Draw IES. Shown in the same clip
is sample text being rendered using the interface. The text is being rendered at an angle with a pattern fill, lighting effects
to give it a 3D look and a drop-shadow to make it look like it is floating above the surface.
The interface looks complicated, but it’s actually very simple once you understand it.
At the top you have the area for entering text,
below which you have the drop-down combo for the font you intend to use.
Below that is a row of buttons for basic text formatting (bold, italics, underline,
strikeout, left-align, center, right-align, justify, vertical-centering,
word-break, and cosmetics). Below these, you have combos for text size, text rotation,
line spacing and character spacing, buttons for insert symbol, replace with symbols,
fit-to-text, text-to-path, and set as default. They all do exactly what you’d expect them to do.
The lower half of the dialog box, which can be collapsed as shown above, is a bit more complicated.
It is divided into three sections with sets of combo-boxes with various symbols next to them. The first section defines the
fill-style, which controls how the text is painted, e.g. with a flat color, a gradient, or even a pattern such as the
“grandma’s flowers” in the sample above (see
Watermark Tutorial for another example).
The smaller combo-boxes next to the main combo-box set the parameters of the fill-style, such as intensity, and the second
large combo-box sets the texture or pattern to use if required. The second section defines the lighting-style,
which controls the lighting effects that are applied to the fill (paint) of the text. In the example above, the lighting style
is an embossed look with the light source at the top left corner of the image. The final section sets the render-style,
which determines the post-processing applied to the final text, such as adding a drop-shadow or a reflection.
The current layer may be resized to fit the text by clicking the Fit to Text button (second button
from the lower left corner).
Special Symbols and Extended/UNICODE Characters
Chasys Draw IES supports the full set of UNICODE characters and will render any character that is supported by
the currently selected font, including special characters. You may insert special characters such as the µ
or £ sign by clicking the Symbol button (first button from the lower left corner).
Just scroll down till you find the symbol you want then click the OK button to use it. If you already have the character you are looking
for copied to the clipboard, you may such for in in the UNICODE character-set using the search button; this may be useful for finding
related characters.