Titles and text

Add a title

Open the Library’s Text page. Its left column has three shelves:

• Titles: one card, Default title. Click it and a plain title lands at the playhead on the first free lane above the picture. Drag it onto a lane instead to choose where it goes.
• Styles: ready-made looks. Click one and the title arrives already styled.
• Languages: the same, for scripts that need their own font (Japanese, Arabic, Hindi and so on); the font is installed with the look.

In 0.2.6 the looks sit on one shelf; the Styles and Languages split is in the next release.

On a phone, Text on the bottom strip has Add a title and the same looks.

Write the words

Select the title and type into the Content box at the top of the Inspector’s Text tab. Press Return for a new line. The monitor updates as you type.

Place it

Drag the title on the monitor to move it; drag a corner grip to scale it; drag the stem above the box to rotate it. Shift while dragging snaps to the guides. The Position section at the bottom of the Text tab holds the same two numbers, Horizontal and Vertical, if you prefer typing.

Style it

The Text tab, top to bottom:

Section	Controls
Typography	Font (with search, and Import a font… for a file of your own), Font Weight (Regular, Medium, SemiBold, Bold), Size, Italic, Color, Opacity, Drop shadow, Background and its colour, opacity, corner radius and padding
Stroke	Width, Color, Opacity
Layout	Text Align, Width and Height (a number or Auto), Line height, Tracking
Position	Horizontal, Vertical

Two of these do the heavy lifting for titles that sit over footage:

• Drop shadow is a soft shadow under the words, for titles that have to sit over footage you do not control.
• Background is a solid box behind the words. Where a shadow softens the footage, a plate replaces it; use it when what is underneath is busy. The plate takes a colour, an opacity, a corner radius and padding, and goes round-ended when the plate is pill-shaped.

A title with no box wraps at the frame’s edge instead of running off it.

Style several at once

Select more than one title (Shift-click, or drag a box around them on the lane) and the Text tab reads “Editing N titles”. Font, size, colours, stroke, shadow, background, box and alignment apply to all of them in one undo step. Position, rotation and scale move them together and keep their spacing.

Make it the default

Click Use for new titles, under the Font picker. From then on every new title and every generated caption starts in that look. Set a CJK face once and it is used from then on.

Fonts

The Font picker lists the bundled face, any fonts you have imported, then the machine’s fonts. From the next release the picker has a search box, and a title whose font is not installed on this machine shows FONT NOT FOUND and draws in a fallback; install the font or pick another. Imported fonts live with Concat, so a project that uses one opens the same way on another machine once the font is imported there too.

Shapes

The Library’s Stickers page has a Shapes shelf: Square, Circle, Triangle, Parallelogram, Trapezoid, Line and Arrow. Click to place one at the playhead; it gets the same Transform and Blend controls as a picture, under a Vector Image tab.