Text Properties

Use this page when a line of dialogue needs to stand out, text must run vertically, spacing must be tuned, or a text region has to be rotated. It documents the text-typography fields in the editor’s “Property Editor”: Font, Font Size, Font Color, Line Spacing, Letter Spacing, Angle, Alignment, and Direction, together with their selection semantics, save timing, and rendering consumers.

Editing text content itself (original text, translation, pre-replacement translation, the placeholder/newline buttons, and the OCR/Translate buttons) is covered in Region List and Text Editing; style presets and stroke are covered in Style Properties; aligning/distributing regions on the canvas is covered in Display, Compare, and Arrange.

What you can do

• The left-panel “Property Editor” contains, top to bottom, the “Image Editing”, “Text Content”, “Style Settings”, and “Actions” groups. This guide covers the typography fields in “Style Settings” that change a region’s text appearance: Font:, Font Size:, Font Color:, Line Spacing:, Letter Spacing:, Angle:, Alignment:, and Direction:.
• The “Text Content” and “Actions” groups belong to Region List and Text Editing; this guide only references their field names and writeback semantics without repeating them.
• “Style Preset:”, “Stroke Color:”, and “Stroke Width:” in “Style Settings” belong to Style Properties.
• The mask/brush/clone-stamp tools and layers in “Image Editing” belong to Canvas Tools and Selection and Mask, Paint, and Clone Stamp.
• The “Alignment:” field here is the text alignment inside the text box (auto/left/center/right). It is not the “Arrange” action that aligns multiple text boxes to each other; the latter belongs to Display, Compare, and Arrange.

Use it in the editor

Property-panel sections and selection semantics

After opening the editor, the left panel defaults to “Property Editor”. The selection state decides which of the four groups is enabled, handled centrally by PropertyPanel.on_selection_changed():

Selection state	Text Content	Style Settings	Actions	Behavior
No selection	Disabled	Disabled	Disabled	Text boxes are cleared, font size resets to 12, line/letter spacing reset to 1.0, angle resets to 0, colors restore their defaults
Single selection	Enabled	Enabled	Enabled	The panel shows every field of that region and both text and typography can be edited
Multi selection	Disabled	Enabled	Enabled	Text boxes are cleared but the style controls stay enabled; typography changes apply to all selected regions as one undoable command

Multi selection has no dedicated “mixed value” UI: the style controls keep their previous values, and any change emits style_patch_requested(selected-indices, patch), which the controller normalizes and merges into a single MultiRegionUpdateCommand.

Edit typography fields

1. Select one text region on the canvas; the “Style Settings” group becomes enabled.
2. “Font:” is a searchable FontComboBox listing system fonts and fonts registered from the project fonts/ directory; hovering a list item temporarily refreshes the text-box preview, while clicking commits the region font_family. Leaving or closing the list restores the current font. When “Disable System Fonts” is enabled in Typesetting, new choices here are limited to project fonts.
3. “Font Size:” is a number input (8–1000) plus a slider (8–150) that stay in sync; values beyond the slider range can still be typed into the input.
4. “Font Color:” is a color picker; recently used colors are saved to the saved_colors config entry.
5. “Line Spacing:” and “Letter Spacing:” range from 0.1 to 5.0 in 0.1 steps, start at 1.0, and act as multipliers of the base spacing.
6. “Angle:” ranges from -9999 to 9999 degrees in whole-degree steps with a ° suffix; changing it rotates the region geometry around the white-frame center.
7. “Alignment:” offers Auto/Left/Center/Right; “Direction:” offers only Horizontal/Vertical (auto is excluded; see Parameters and options).
8. Every control change emits a style patch immediately; there is no separate “Save” step, and a batch of changes merges into one undoable command.

Text content and actions

The “Text Content” group maintains three text fields: source text, final translation, and pre-replacement translation_raw. “Show Translation (Raw)” is checked by default; when checked, the editor edits translation_raw and regeneration of translation through replacement rules happens in real time. The “Actions” group offers Copy/Paste/Delete. Field writeback, the ↵/[BR] conversion, the placeholder/newline buttons, and the OCR/Translate buttons are detailed in Region List and Text Editing.

Parameters and options

See the UI Options Reference for how each parameter's UI name, stored key, and default value map to each other.

Font

Choose the text font under “Font:” in Property panel → Style Settings. The dropdown is searchable and lists system fonts plus scalable fonts registered from the project fonts/ directory, with display names localized per language; leaving it empty follows the global rendering font. An unavailable font does not block rendering: it falls back to the default font with a warning.

Font Size

Adjust the font size in Property panel → Style Settings: the number input ranges 8–1000 and the slider ranges 8–150, kept in sync; the slider covers only the common range. You can also hold Ctrl and scroll the wheel over the canvas to resize all selected regions. The white frame is recomputed after a change and may overlap neighboring regions.

Font Color

Open the color picker in Property panel → Style Settings to choose the text color. Setting it overrides the original foreground color detected by OCR and shows immediately in the canvas preview and final rendering; recently used colors are saved to the app config so you can pick them directly next time.

Line Spacing

Adjust the line-spacing multiplier in Property panel → Style Settings (0.1–5.0 in 0.1 steps); 1.0 means the default line spacing. The white frame is recomputed after a change.

Letter Spacing

Adjust the letter-spacing multiplier in Property panel → Style Settings (0.1–5.0 in 0.1 steps); 1.0 means the default letter spacing. The white frame is recomputed after a change.

Angle

Enter the rotation angle in degrees in Property panel → Style Settings (-9999–9999 in whole-degree steps); 0.0 means no rotation. The region geometry is rotated around the white-frame center and the text box is drawn rotated by that angle.

Alignment

Choose how text sits inside the box from the dropdown in Property panel → Style Settings:

Option	Description
Auto	The layout pipeline decides the alignment
Left	Text is aligned to the left edge of the box
Center	Text is centered horizontally inside the box
Right	Text is aligned to the right edge of the box

Direction

Choose the text layout direction from the dropdown in Property panel → Style Settings (the dropdown does not offer “Auto”):

Option	Description
Horizontal	Text runs left to right and wraps by line
Vertical	Text runs top to bottom and is laid out by column

A region without an explicit direction is shown by white-frame aspect ratio (taller than wide shows vertical, otherwise horizontal); the inference does not write back to the region data. Horizontal and vertical take different layout and replacement paths; see How direction changes rendering.

How changes are saved

Style-patch merging and save timing

The typography fields have no separate “Save” button: every control change emits a patch through style_patch_requested, and EditorController.update_region_style_patch() filters _STYLE_PATCH_FIELDS, normalizes values (font_size lower bound 1, spacing/stroke to float, stroke_color to bg_colors RGB, alignment/direction normalized), then merges all selected regions into one MultiRegionUpdateCommand, so a single change can be fully undone with Ctrl+Z. The block_updates flag stops the panel’s own refresh from re-emitting signals and creating a loop.

flowchart LR
    A["Typography control change\n(font/size/color/spacing/angle/alignment/direction)"] --> B["style_patch_requested\n(selected indices, patch)"]
    B --> C["update_region_style_patch"]
    C --> D["Filter _STYLE_PATCH_FIELDS and normalize"]
    D --> E{"angle in patch?"}
    E -->|yes| R["Rotate region geometry\naround white-frame center"]
    E -->|no| F["Compare per field, skip unchanged regions"]
    R --> F
    F --> G["Font-affecting field?\nfont_size/font_family/line_spacing/\nletter_spacing/direction"]
    G -->|yes| S["Sync white-frame size\nrecompute with calc_box_from_font"]
    G -->|no| H["MultiRegionUpdateCommand\n(one undoable command)"]
    S --> H
    H --> I["EditorModel updates all selected regions"]
    I --> J["Canvas re-render + undo history"]

How direction changes rendering

Direction is the only typography field that switches both the render function and the replacement-rule group: horizontal uses put_text_horizontal and the horizontal replacement group, while vertical uses put_text_vertical and the vertical replacement group. When editing translation_raw, apply_replacements() picks the group by the region’s current direction, so the same pre-replacement text can produce different final translations in horizontal versus vertical layout.

flowchart LR
    subgraph H["direction = horizontal"]
        H1["put_text_horizontal"] --> H2["Left-to-right, wraps by line"]
        H3["Replacement group horizontal\n(direction == 0)"] --> H4["Applied while editing translation_raw"]
    end
    subgraph V["direction = vertical"]
        V1["put_text_vertical"] --> V2["Top-to-bottom, runs by column"]
        V3["Replacement group vertical\n(direction == 1)"] --> V4["Applied while editing translation_raw"]
    end
    D["Region direction field"] --> H
    D --> V

When a region has no explicit direction, the Property Editor infers the displayed value from the white-frame aspect ratio (taller than wide shows vertical) without writing region direction; the render service, in calculate_default_parameters(), derives the default direction by aspect ratio instead (ratio above 2 is horizontal, below 0.5 is vertical, otherwise auto).

Limitations and notes

• Typography writeback depends on single selection or style-only multi selection: with multiple regions selected the text-content group is disabled and only typography changes broadcast to all selected regions.
• A text control being edited is not overwritten by ordinary refreshes; only asynchronous writebacks (source="async") force-refresh text fields, protecting the caret and IME composition.
• The Property Editor’s sliders, number inputs, and dropdowns swallow the wheel only when they hold keyboard focus; otherwise the wheel goes to the parent scroll area and does not change values by accident.
• Ctrl+wheel resizes the font of all selected regions and Shift+wheel changes the shared brush size; both combinations are intercepted by the shortcut manager, see Shortcuts.
• Font size, letter spacing, line spacing, and direction are font-affecting fields; after writeback the white-frame size is resynced. The sync changes only the frame’s width, height, and center while keeping the body center fixed.
• The “Alignment:” field is text alignment inside the box; the six-way align/distribute actions in the “Arrange” menu align text boxes to each other. Do not mix the two.
• An unavailable font does not block rendering: it falls back to the default font with a warning; hand-editing JSON with a font-file path instead of a family name will not take effect.
• Stroke color/width and style presets belong to Style Properties; this guide does not repeat their parameter definitions.