Canvas manual/Text & typography

Text & typography

Type with a full inspector — family, weight, size, variable-font axes, OpenType features, spacing, alignment and case — then save what you land on as a reusable text style.

Add text

The Text tool behaves two ways.

  1. Press T or pick the Text chip.
  2. Click for point text — a caret that grows as you type. Drag for a fixed-width box that wraps.
  3. Double-click any text layer later to edit it; Esc to finish.

The text inspector

Select a text layer to reveal the Text section. Top to bottom:

Text style

An Apply style… dropdown and a Save button to store the current settings as a named style (see below).

Font & weight

A family dropdown (a marks a variable font), a weight picker from Thin through Black, and a size field.

Variable axes

Variable fonts only.

Sliders for the font’s axes — weight (wght), width (wdth), slant (slnt), optical size (opsz) — for fine control beyond named weights.

OpenType

Toggles for Ligatures, Small caps, Tabular figures, Fractions, and stylistic Alternates, where the font supports them.

Spacing

Line height and Letter spacing fields.

Alignment

Horizontal (left / center / right / justify) and vertical (top / middle / bottom) within the text box.

Decoration & case

Underline / Strikethrough / Italic, and a letter-case switch: As typed · UPPER · lower · Title.

Resizing

Width and height each set to Wrap (auto-size to the text) or Fixed. Manually resizing a text box switches it to Fixed.

Text styles

Reusable typography — set it once, apply it everywhere, and keep a document consistent.

The style picker shows two groups: Your text styles (the ones you save) and a built-in Type rampHeading · Subheading · Body · Caption. Dial a text layer in, hit Save to name it, then apply that style to any other text from the dropdown.

Styles are personal to your browser. An agent connected to the workspace reads and writes the same set — see Canvas API.

Convert text to outlines

When you need the letters as editable vector shapes.

From the editor menu, Text → Outlines turns a text layer into vector paths — useful before boolean operations or precise cutting. It’s one-way: the result is shapes, not editable text, so keep the original if you might re-word it.