Text and type

The text slot and its five entries

The rail is grouped. You do not see 52 buttons, you see about 19: four core navigation buttons, twelve group slots and three standalone tools. Text lives in one of those group slots. The slot carries a small triangle; click it and a flyout lists the members. Whichever you pick stays in the slot, saved per slot in your browser, so the rail you end up with is yours and not the one in a screenshot.

The five members are Type Tool, Area Type, Type on a Path, Vertical Type and Touch Type. Type Tool is the slot default and the only one with a keyboard shortcut. The other four construct the same Text engine and arm a preset before you press:

• Area Type arms an area preset, so pressing a shape creates new text flowed inside that shape.
• Type on a Path arms a path preset, so clicking a path runs the text along it.
• Vertical Type arms a vertical writing mode, so the text flows top to bottom.
• Touch Type arms a preset that grabs a single character, which you can then move, rotate and scale with knobs on the canvas.

A naming inconsistency you will notice: the rail tooltip reads "Text [T]" while the flyout relabels the same tool "Type Tool". Same tool, two labels. We have not settled it yet.

Setting some type

1. Pick the text slot Press T, or click the slot in the rail. If the slot currently holds one of the presets, open the flyout and choose Type Tool.
2. Click where the text should start A caret appears and the editor mounts. Type.
3. Style it from the option bar The bar across the top switches to the text controls as soon as the tool is active. Font family, style and size are the first three.
4. Leave the text Switch to the Select tool with V when you want to move or transform the object rather than edit its characters.

Every text object is a real SVG text element in the document, not a picture of text. That is the point of the whole editor: the document is SVG, so what you export is what you were editing.

What the option bar actually gives you

The text bar is built by the text engine and mirrored into the chrome. Left to right you get a font family combo, a font upload button, a font style combo, font size, line height with a unit, alignment, superscript and subscript, letter and word spacing, and the writing direction controls.

• Font Family is a type-ahead combo of the registered families. It defaults to Arial where Arial is registered, otherwise Roboto, which is always embedded.
• Font Size is in points, default 16, with presets from 4 up to 144. The value is converted to pixels before it is applied.
• Line height defaults to 1.25 with a unit combo offering cm, mm, in, pc, px, pt, %, em and ex. Default unit is em.
• Letter spacing and word spacing are number fields from 0 to 10.
• Alignment is left, centre and right, which sets both text-align and the text anchor.

Two honest caveats. The letter spacing control is labelled pt but the handler applies the value in px, so trust the result on canvas rather than the unit in the label. And kerning, vertical shift and character rotation exist but are permanently parked in the bar's overflow dropdown rather than shown inline. Touch Type is the intended way to drive those on the canvas.

The five button groups for alignment, baseline shift, text direction, text orientation and paragraph direction do not sit in the bar as full rows of buttons. Each folds into a single control showing the current icon plus a caret, with the choices in a dropdown. It keeps the bar readable on a laptop.

Fonts, including your own

Next to the family combo is a button titled "Upload font from your computer…". It accepts .ttf, .otf, .woff, .woff2 and .ttc, and it takes more than one file at a time. An uploaded font is registered into the live font list, saved to your device so it survives a reload, and on Pro it mirrors to the cloud so it reaches your other machines.

A family that has to be fetched rather than one already loaded shows struck through in the list until its bytes arrive. Pick it and it fetches. This matters more than it sounds: saving as .rzv embeds the fonts in use, so the file stays portable, but a plain SVG export does not carry the font with it.

Thai and other complex scripts

Here is the rule, and it is worth knowing before you type a word of Thai. When you type, Rayzia checks each character against the font that is currently active. If the font has no glyph for that character, the character is drawn as a question mark.

This is deliberate. A font with no Thai glyphs maps every Thai character to its .notdef glyph, whose outline is empty. Text made of empty outlines has no measurable bounding box, which used to strand the whole object at the document origin instead of at your caret, invisible and hard to recover. Substituting a visible question mark keeps the geometry valid and keeps the text where you put it.

So if you see rows of question marks, nothing is broken and nothing is lost. You are in a Latin-only font. Choose a family that carries the script, or upload one, and the characters render properly. The same substitution runs for typing and for paste, so both behave alike.

Fonts are fetched over the network. Offline, or where an external font server is unreachable, only the embedded families are available, which is a real constraint for non-Latin work. Uploading the font you need is the reliable fix.

Common questions