Fun With Fontwork in Draw

 

Fontwork is a feature that lets you create curved, angled, wavy, and other kinds of text. Use it for CD labels, for festive banners, for anything where text needs to look interesting and follow a particular angle or line.

Fontwork previously was.....interesting. Doable, but interesting and just a little twitchy. And not a lot of labels in the window, so it was kind of hard to figure out.

But it's a whole new, simpler, slicker, more wizardy approach this time in OpenOffice.org 2.0.

1. Click the Fontwork icon on the Drawing toolbar.

2. In the window that appears, double-click the style you want.

3. A piece of text with that style will appear in your slide.

4. Double-click the Fontwork text, select the black plain text that appears, and type the text you want.

5. Change the font if you like as usual, with the font dropdown list at the top left of the work area, or with the Character window.

6. Change the font size by holding down the shift key and dragging a corner handle, as you would a graphic.

7. Format the text color and line width, not with the normal text controls, but with the line and area fills.

8. In the Fontwork toolbar that appears, use the controls to change the entire style of the text, change letter height, text justification, and other options. If you don't see this toolbar, choose View > Toolbars > Fontwork.

9. Use the yellow handle to change the angle of the text.

If you didn't use the old 1.x Fontwork, trust me...this is soooo much better.

Comments

[Derek]

Thank you very much for the clear instructions. It was a great help.

[Miles Lane]

Well, Fontwork seems okay, but I really miss WordArt's ability to work with any Truetype font. Fontwork seems wedded to the default san serif font. All that can be changed are the deformation, shading, rotation, sizing and colorization of the text. While this is pretty good, I have a need to be able to different fonts to help users distinguish one block of text from other adjacent blocks.
Miles

[Jim]

Thanks for the quick overview! That was a big help.

[Dave]

quote:
"I have a need to be able to [use] different fonts"

Double-click the Fontwork text, select the black plain text that appears, and select the font you would like. Fontwork is not limited to one font, it can use any.

[Anonymous]

You can use any font you have installed.

Do this:

1. Over the fontwork text do a double-click to bring up the editable plain b/w text which is the basis of your fontwork;
2. Triple-click your text making sure you select also an invisible last space after your text -- it works the same if you use Home/End and Shift to select the entire text;
3. Changing the font will now work.

I got this hint elsewhere and post it here. HTH.

[Jay]

fontwork works fine, just like word art,but is there anyway to get better resolution. When I am designing in office 2003 (powerpoint) my 'wordart' is a lot more crisp than what I get with 'fontwork'.

Is there any setting that fixes this, or is 'wordart' superior as far as resolution is concerned.

[Andrea]

I have recently figured out how to set my "default" settings for objects. I like "optimal" but I can't figure out how to do it in Fontworks.

Every time I insert a fontworks object and click-off of it I can't select it again (unless part of it is in the margin).

However, once I select it and change the setting to "wrap- optimal page wrap" then I can move it around and select it.

How do I set "optimal" as my default for Fontworks?

[Marian]

I had problems selecting too, until I discovered somewhere) that if you hold Ctrl while you select it finds the object with no problem.

My difficulty now is getting Fontworrks to show two words in different colours. I can change them in the 'editable text', but when I click out to accept the changes it all shows as one colour. And setting the fontsize of the editable text doesn't seem to have any bearing on the size of font displayed. frustrating!!
Anybody got any ideas?