07 Text
What you'll learn: How DRAW's text tool works, the bundled and custom font support, rich per-character formatting, persistent text layers, and the unique Character Mode for ANSI-style art.
🎯 Goal: Add text to your pixel art.
Press T to grab the Text tool, then click on the canvas to drop a text caret. Type to enter characters; Enter starts a new line; Escape commits the text and exits text-entry mode.
| Font | Shortcut | Description |
|---|---|---|
| VGA | T |
Classic 8×8 monospace — the iconic DOS look. |
| Tiny5 | Shift+T |
Minimal 5×5 — perfect for tight UI labels. |
| Custom TTF / OTF |
Ctrl+T, or Left-Click in the font dropdown |
Load any vector font from disk. |
DRAW ships with 24 color bitmap fonts in the DPaint-style .bmp spritesheet format. Their pixels are preserved verbatim — no antialiasing, no recoloring — at a fixed native height per font. PSF, BDF, and Fontaption formats are also supported.
When the text tool is active, a property bar appears with the font dropdown, size, and the standard formatting toggles (bold, italic, underline, strikethrough). This bar is fixed in position under the menu bar and not movable or undockable.
🎯 Goal: Apply advanced text formatting.
While editing a text layer, every character can carry its own properties. Selection works exactly like a desktop word processor:
| Action | Result |
|---|---|
Shift+Arrow |
Select characters one at a time. |
| Double-click | Select word. |
| Triple-click | Select line. |
| Quad-click | Select all. |
Ctrl+A |
Select all. |
Per-character properties:
- Bold / Italic / Underline / Strikethrough
- Outline — color + size.
- Shadow — color + X/Y offset (1–10px).
- Per-character FG and BG colors.
- Letter spacing and line height.
Auto-wrap reflows the text inside the bounding box. Style presets let you save the entire formatting state of a selection as a named preset and apply it elsewhere with one click — Save / Load / Update / Delete buttons live in the property bar.
While in text-entry mode, Ctrl+Z and Ctrl+Y operate on a separate 128-state text-local history. This means typo experiments don't pollute your global history. Sound feedback on each keystroke is configurable in audio settings.
🎯 Goal: Master persistent text and ANSI-style art.
Once you commit a text-tool entry, it becomes a text layer — fully persisted in .draw files and re-editable forever. Click it again with the text tool to resume editing. From the Layer menu you can:
- Rasterize a single text layer (bake it into pixels).
- Rasterize all text layers (one-shot flatten of every text layer).
- Insert a new empty text layer ready for typing.
Character Mode is for ANSI / DOS / text-mode art. Once enabled, the canvas is treated as a grid of cells with a virtual cursor:
NOTE: DRAW is NOT a full fledged text mode art program, but this is a neat way to make GUI elements!
- Free grid navigation with arrow keys.
-
F1–F12insert ANSI block characters (░ ▒ ▓ █ ▀ ▄ ▌ ▐). - "Font stickiness" — the chosen font follows the cursor as you navigate.
- The DOT and RECT drawing tools fill cells with the current glyph instead of pixels.
-
Alt+Upicks both the FG and BG colors from the character under the cursor. - A character grid overlay snaps cursor positions cleanly.
Open with Ctrl+M for a 16×16 grid of all 256 glyphs in the active font.
- Click a glyph to insert it (or use it as a custom brush).
- Dock the panel left or right.
- Toggle Unicode / CP437 mapping with
Ctrl+Shift+U.
📸 Screenshot needed — Character Map panel
- Setup: Switch to VGA font, enable Character Mode, open
Ctrl+M.- Action: Hover one of the block-shading glyphs (e.g.,
▒).- Capture: Character Map panel docked right, glyph grid clearly visible.
- Save as:
images/ch07-charmap.png
🎨 Try it — DOS-style title card
- Enable Character Mode.
- Pick the VGA font.
- Use
F1–F4to lay block shading along the borders.- Switch FG/BG colors per cell with
Alt+Uto match an existing color set.
➡️ Next: [Chapter 8 — Grid, Symmetry & Drawing Aids](08 - Grid Symmetry)