Gem of a trick!

[wideangle]

Some of you will no doubt be well aware of this, but I wasn't!

I've just stumbled on this accidentally while trying to add a text object through the Objects and Animation option, and trying to decide which font to use for a title.

First add some text.

If you then double click inside the drop-down box showing the font name it becomes highlighted.

Make sure that your mouse pointer stays over the font name.

You can then use your mouse wheel to run through your fonts and see the effect immediately, making it easy to find a suitable font.

(The up and down arrow keys also work here).

(I know that similar approaches work in other packages but hadn't got it to work here until I realised that the mouse pointer must stay over the font name!)

Hope this helps a few people.

Regards,

wideangle

[mhwarner]

Thanks for pointing this out. Photoshop has a similar feature. This is really helpful in deciding which font looks best.

Another tip that I discovered, which may or may not be documented somewhere, is that if you click on the text object itself, while you can drag any of the handles to resize it proportionally, if you hold down the SHIFT key and drag on one of the sides, you can resize in that direction only (i.e., make taller text or fatter text without resizing the other direction).

[Lin Evans]

Hi Mary,

Actually that applies to "any" object whether text or image, etc. As documented, you can click on the small square between the X and Y axis to change either from symmetrical change with equal X and Y axis to independent control over X and Y axis but you can do likewise by holding down the shift key then visually dragging to change. The only caveat is that you release the mouse key before the shift key to make the changes "stick".

Best regards,

Lin

Thanks for pointing this out. Photoshop has a similar feature. This is really helpful in deciding which font looks best.

Another tip that I discovered, which may or may not be documented somewhere, is that if you click on the text object itself, while you can drag any of the handles to resize it proportionally, if you hold down the SHIFT key and drag on one of the sides, you can resize in that direction only (i.e., make taller text or fatter text without resizing the other direction).