A Blender add-on that lets you edit 3D text as naturally as drinking water. Everything you want — multi-line text input, live font preview, invalid font exclusion, font family weight selection, one-click horizontal/vertical layout, and an ultra-comfortable UI — is here!
Multi-line.textinput.mp4
- Multi-line text input (requires Blender 5.2+)
- New line = Shift+Enter | Confirm = Enter
FontSelector.mp4
- Live preview: Preview font and weight in real time; use the current input as preview text (or the font name / a custom string)
- Live apply: Change font and weight on hover
- Invalid font exclusion: Automatically match fonts that support your input (tip: when text turns into “□”, open the font library to fix — works great!)
- Weight merging: Merge weights within the same font family
- Filters: Filter by language, support status, or multi-weight families
- Search: Search fonts (English keyboard input only for now; paste text in other scripts to search)
- Cross-platform: Scan system fonts (Windows / macOS / Linux)
Horizontal.vertical.text.modes.mp4
-
Horizontal / Vertical: One-click switch; vertical mode supports left-to-right and right-to-left column order
-
Fullwidth fix (alignment fix): Detect halfwidth characters and convert to fullwidth to fix alignment (note: some fonts with special glyphs may look odd)
FixFont.mp4
TextEdit.mp4
- Draggable; appears near the selected text
- Style presets, GPU font picker, bold / italic / underline / strikethrough
- Case toggles, alignment, spacing sliders (size, character, word, line height, shear, etc.)
- Double-click empty space to enter / exit text edit mode
- Simplified Chinese UI (auto-detected from Blender locale)
- Traditional Chinese UI (
zh_Hant) - Japanese UI (
ja_JP) - Customizable HUD accent color and scale
- Follow system colors — adaptive theme support
Adaptive.Theme.mp4
| Feature | Blender native | Text Helper | |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Multi-line text editor in N-panel (Blender 5.2+) | ✓ | ✓ |
| 2 | Edit while seeing full paragraph layout in sidebar | ✗ | ✓ |
| 3 | Browse & search system fonts (not just fonts already in the .blend) | ✗ | ✓ |
| 4 | Live font / weight preview on hover | ✗ | ✓ |
| 5 | Live font / weight apply on hover | ✗ | ✓ |
| 6 | Filter fonts by glyph support for your text | ✗ | ✓ |
| 7 | Pinyin / kana assisted font search (CJK) | ✗ | ✓ |
| 8 | Font favorites, recents, family weight picker | ✗ | ✓ |
| 9 | Floating viewport toolbar next to selected text | ✗ | ✓ |
| 10 | Viewport header formatting toolbar | ✗ | ✓ |
| 11 | One-click horizontal ↔ vertical layout + column order | ✗ | ✓ |
| 12 | Fullwidth fix for vertical CJK alignment | ✗ | ✓ |
| 13 | Style presets + spacing sliders with inline numeric edit | ✗ | ✓ |
| 14 | Multi-select batch text formatting | ✗ | ✓ |
| 15 | Character count & configurable text length limit | ✗ | ✓ |
| 16 | Localized UI (zh_Hans / zh_Hant / ja_JP) for text tools | ✗ | ✓ |
| 17 | In-viewport text edit mode (EDIT_FONT) | ✓ | ✓ |
| Improvement | 1.9.x | 2.0 | |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Fast loading (async font catalog prefetch) | ✗ | ✓ |
| 2 | Non-blocking scan — UI stays responsive while catalog loads | ✗ | ✓ |
| 3 | Filter / search result cache (reopen picker without rescanning) | ✗ | ✓ |
| 4 | “Hide unsupported” uses chunked per-frame glyph refine (list first, filter later) | ✗ | ✓ |
| 5 | Family-level glyph checks before per-file work (fewer redundant tests) | ✗ | ✓ |
| 6 | Viewport header toolbar (formatting without floating HUD) | partial | ✓ |
| 7 | HUD spacing sliders: click-to-type, drag-select, clipboard shortcuts | ✗ | ✓ |
| 8 | Multi-select batch editing with undo | ✗ | ✓ |
| 9 | Theme-adaptive HUD colors (light / dark Blender themes) | ✗ | ✓ |
| 10 | OpenType weight grouping preference (family name vs file name) | ✗ | ✓ |
| 11 | Operator tooltips fully translated (ja / zh_Hant) | partial | ✓ |
Font picker performance (2.0): opening the list no longer waits for a full system-font scan or a complete glyph audit. The catalog loads in the background, cached filters reuse previous work, and unsupported fonts are removed incrementally across frames so you can scroll and pick fonts right away.
- Download
TextHelper-X.X.X.zipfrom Releases, or build locally (see below). - In Blender: Edit → Preferences → Get Extensions → Install from Disk…
- Select the zip and enable Text Helper.
- Clone this repository into your extensions folder, e.g.
%APPDATA%\Blender Foundation\Blender\5.2\extensions\user_default\TextHelper - Restart Blender or refresh extensions.
From the TextHelper add-on directory:
blender --command extension validate
blender --command extension buildOutput: TextHelper-2.0.0.zip
A helper script _build_texthelper_zip.py is also available in the parent DATA folder for quick local copies; use the Blender CLI output for Extension Store submissions.
- For performance, font glyph matching deduplicates characters and caps unique coverage checks at 2048 codepoints.
- Vertical text: fullwidth fix does not work for fonts that lack fullwidth glyphs.
- Vertical text: fullwidth fix may look poor on special symbols in some non-standard fonts.
Declared in blender_manifest.toml:
| Permission | Use |
|---|---|
| files | Load fonts from disk; cache preview thumbnails |
| clipboard | Paste text into the active text object |
No network access.
- Add or select a Font object.
- Open the Text Helper tab in the 3D View sidebar.
- Type or paste text; toggle the floating toolbar from the panel header (overlay icon).
- Use Font on the HUD to open the viewport font picker, or adjust formatting from the toolbar.
Preferences: Edit → Preferences → Add-ons → Text Helper.
- Blender 5.2.0 or newer
- Multi-line sidebar textbox requires Blender 5.2+