Text Effects
The Text Effects toolbar is the middle of the three toolbars. It is used for text-based items, and is disabled when no text-based items are selected.This page lists all of the Text Effects controls and their uses. (See Font and Image Effects for controls that affect fonts.)
Setting an Item's Text Color
Text items can be assigned a default text color. The text will display in the chosen color, except when the value of a rich text item contains text-color markup.
To set a text item's color, click the Text color well control at the left end of the Text Effects toolbar to open the Color Picker. Select your color using the Color Picker.
Please see About Color for important information about the use of color.
Text Alignment
Select the horizontal alignment (left, centered, right, or justified) from the Text Alignment control.Vertical Text Alignment
Select the vertical alignment (top, middle, or bottom) from the Vertical Text Alignment control.Shrinking and Snugging
The Shrink and Snug control helps to ensure that your text items fit neatly within their bounds.By default, if the text in a text item is too long to fit within the item's bounds, only the part that fits is shown. Obviously this is to be avoided. More often, the text on some cards may need much less space than on other cards: in these cases, an item with a background color or margin may look overlarge and empty.
Select Shrink to make Multideck automatically use a smaller font size when needed to ensure that your text will fit within its item's bounds, so that the entire text is visible. It is applied on a card-to-card basis, and will not affect cards that don't need it.
Please note that Multideck will always shrink an item's title to fit when not in Preview mode.
Also note that Shrink to Fit will not reduce the font to a size smaller than 3.0. At this size the text will be nearly illegible anyway.
The Snug Vertical and Snug Horizontal controls allow items to become smaller than their set size, on cards where the item's text does not fill all the space available.
Snugging is affected by the item's horizontal text alignment (left, center, right, or justified) and its vertical text alignment (top, middle, or bottom). If, for example, the item is bottom-aligned, then the bottom of the item will remain fixed and the top will move down in order to "snug vertical". If the item has center alignment, then it will shrink symmetrically around its centerpoint in order to "snug horizontal", and so on.
If a snugged item has no value, it will not be visible on the card. This is the same behavior as the "Hide When Empty" option.
When using the Snug features, set your item's size to the largest size you wish to allow. An item's size will never increase; it can only get smaller. This ensures that if the text overflows, the item itself will not grow out of bounds.
Note that the snugging behavior is visible when you preview or print your document. In the Layout tab when you are not previewing, you will see your item at its basic (largest possible) size.
Enforcing Line Height
By default, items that display multi-line text will use appropriate line heights (vertical distance between lines). Line height may vary within an item for rich text which contains markup, and especially if it contains inline images. You may use the line height controls to specify and enforce a constant line height.Select the Line Height option in the Text Effects toolbar to enforce a constant line height for the selected card items. To set the height, either edit the text field (in points, like font size) or use the stepper buttons to increment or decrement the height. You will see the changes immediately in the layout area if you are in Preview mode.
As a convenience, you may click the "Use Suggested Line Height" button to set a reasonable value based on your font and font size. You can then edit the number or use the stepper to adjust the value.
The line height you choose will not automatically change if you later change the font or font size.
Enforcing a line height that differs substantially from the "natural" line height may affect the size of inline images.
Outlined Fonts
You can overlay text onto an image by placing a text field on top of an image field. But dark text will not display well when placed over a dark image, nor light text over a light image.Using an outlined font can be a good solution for this problem. You can use black for the basic text color, but outline the text in white. Then the white outline shows well against dark backgrounds, while the black text shows well against light backgrounds.
Select Outlined in the Text Effects panel to turn on this feature. By default, the outline color is white, and the outline width is 2% of the font size. You may use the controls in the Effects panel to change these defaults.
The Outline Font controls.
Be aware that the outline feature may not look its best at low resolution or smaller font sizes. We don't recommend using it for fine print, and your cards may look better when printed at 300dpi than they do on your computer screen.
Any font can be outlined. The phrase "outlined font" may sound as if you need a specific kind of font, but you may use this feature with any font you choose. But be aware that it may not be suitable for some fonts.