Basic text tools and text elements

I’ve now added some very basic text functionality, allowing users to add text to their designs. Compared to other design software it’s not much, missing more or less all more advanced typography features, but it’s a start and has all the fundamental building blocks in place:

• A new text tool letting you create new text boxes
• Text string and font parameters, letting you set (and connect) text and strings
• Text elements, representing a generated text area with size, content and font settings.
• Layer Nodes for generating and modifying Text elements

When I implemented text elements in Patternodes and Vectoraster I only generated paths based on the text characters. Something like “convert to outlines” in other design software. This is useful and something I’m planning to support in Paragraphic as well, since it makes the text characters work like any other path elements (like shapes, lines etc). However, it has the drawback that once created you can’t later modify the text content, and that the text will not be editable in exported formats.

So this time, I’ve instead decided on introducing a new Text Element type that represents basically a text box, with text content, font and alignment. This means the content and properties will then be possible to change by later nodes, just like base element properties like fill color or stroke. On export this text element is represented as an SVG <text> tag, which means it will export as editable text. This SVG text tag compatibility does however mean that it will be limited to the properties that it supports for styling and layout. The base SVG text tags also do not support alignment or multi-line text (though it might in SVG 2.0). As this is something I want to support in the Paragraphic text elements. So in these cases it will likely export as a <text> tag with multiple offset <tspan> tags for each individual line.

Additional changes

UI

• Improved color well controls, with some nicer styling and now color transparency indication.
• Improved selection marking with icons showing if the layer is a linked instance layer or if the layer position is locked.
• Support for using tools inside transformed element groups.
• Improved selection button menus with support for long scrolling menus and sub-menus (for the font menu)