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Text Objects

Text objects behave much like graphics objects in that they can be moved, rotated, layered and resized.

To create a text object you:

Text boxes that have not been manually resized expand to fit the text typed into the box. Once a text box has been resized manually it will not expand as you type.

Text boxes unrotate when they are edited.

The appearance of the text can be controlled by the Font Panel and the options in the appropriate menu items under the Tools menu.

By default text boxes are opaque. Whatever is behind the text is hidden. Using the Appearance Inspector text boxes can be set to have borders or to have a colored background, or be made transparent.

Text box placement adapts itself to pages that are rotated 180º when "Unrotate Objects When Added" is selected in the preferences dialog. This is helpful if, for instance, you have a PDF document that was scanned upside down, and that needs to be filled in (a form). You can select all pages in the list of pages and rotate them 180º. To make text boxes (and graphics objects) work as expected in this case you need to select "Unrotate Objects When Added" in the application preferences. This will cause the objects not to follow the rotation of the page, which would cause them to appear upside down when first added to a page, but force them to be oriented without rotation. Any subsequent rotation of the page will cause its objects to rotate along with the page.

If you need to fill out a form don't forget the use of the "Tighten" and "Loosen" options in the "Kern" submenu of the "Tools" menu. They have convenient shortcuts so that it is easier to space the text on your form. [⌃⌥⇧⌘T] and [⌃⌥⇧⌘L].)

You can import a number of text based files by dragging them onto the list of pages -in which case as many new pages will be created as needed to fit the document - or by dragging them onto a displayed page in which case a text box will be created that is at most no larger than the size of the page and only the first page of the document will be shown. PDFClerk imports RTF, RTFD and plaintext files, and has limited support for import of MS Word documents. With all the richer document types, import results may vary according to document complexity. The less complex a document the better the results will be.

See also

import Topics