3.2 Text Art

Hey welcome back to Up and Running with OnlyOffice Presentations. In the last lesson we looked at inserting text into your slides and doing some basic text formatting. In this lesson, we're gonna see how to do a bit more advanced text formatting using the inbuilt text art feature. This time we're going to be playing around with this in Photo Elements presentation called Cloroma. There'll be a link to this presentation in the notes below this video, and as I mentioned with the other presentation, this is included with your subscription, so if you want to follow along with this go ahead and grab yourself a copy. First off to just give you a little bit of an idea of what you might use the Text Art feature for, this is the default opening title page for this presentation template with the default title. I've just made a duplicate of this slide and just put together a couple of different examples of what you might like to do using these types of tools. Sometimes, you might need to go for a bit more of a subtle look than what you'll achieve when you're using these type of design tools, but sometimes, depending on the nature of what you're working on, this type of display is gonna be just right. So let's check out how you use it. First up, you do have the option to just drag and drop in pre-made text art. So if you go up to the Insert tab, you'll see here Text Art, and if we click the drop-down, you can see a bunch of different pre-made styles. So then you can just click one, and it will drop the text box that's pre-formatted into your design, and then you can replace that text with anything you like. So that's one way you can go about it, or you can select a text box that you've already inserted yourself, and you can go down here to the Text Art panel. This is where you're gonna find the additional formatting settings that you don't have in the basic formatting settings area here. So in a nutshell, what you've got to work with here is different fill styles, different stroke styles, and different transform styles. And to be honest, the transform styles are probably a little bit too strong to be used in most presentations. So I'll give you an example, warping this text. The warping's probably just a little bit too strong to be super readable. So it kind of makes it a bit hard to use these transform functions without having any settings to sort of attenuate the strength of that function. So I'm going to be pretty much ignoring those transform tools and just focusing on what you can do with the fill and stroke tools here. So I'm actually, let me just rework that text so that we're using the same font and the same text as in our examples down here. So we're using the Lato Black font, font size 45. Okay, now first up, I'm just going to get rid of the stroke for now. I'll show you that next. What we can do is apply gradients. So these examples here all have gradients applied to the fill. There's not really any need to worry about using a flat color fill through this part of the interface because you can set a flat color fill here in the basic settings. But what does help is using gradient fill. You can get some really nice effects by applying a gradient to the fill of your text. Now if you have a presentation template like this one here that already has really nice colors picked out, then it makes it really easy to apply nice gradients. So what I can do is just select one end of the gradient, click my color selector button, and then just pick from one of these colors along the top here. So to make this gradient, I'm just going to use this color on the left end. And then on the right end, I'm going to use this color. Now I have this effect here, which is the same as the colors used on this little ball. And to create this blue gradient, process is exactly the same. Let's use the text art panel, and then I'm just going to choose these colors instead. So now that's created that effect. I can also change the direction of the gradient just the same way as you could on the background gradients of the slides that we've covered earlier. So from here, just pick a different direction to control how the gradient is applied to your text. So changing the direction of the gradient is how I created this effect here. You can also go with a radial gradient. So I'm gonna switch from linear to radial. And then if you find that you have the wrong color on the center of the gradient, it normally looks nicer if you have a darker color around the outside of a gradient and a lighter color on the inside of gradient, then you can just drag one of the stops across. Drag the other one all the way to this end. And then the first one all the way to the other end, and now you have a nice gradient. You also have the ability to control the stroke that's applied to your text. So to create this effect here, I'm actually gonna set the fill to no fill at all. And I'm gonna set the Stroke to 1.5 points in width. And then, again, I'm just gonna choose one of the pre-selected colors for this template. And now I have this style here created. And then of course you can also combine different fill styles with different stroke styles as I've done here. So first up, I'm actually going to reproduce this styling on this text. So I've selected this text, I'm gonna grab the copy style tool, and then I'm gonna paint that style on to this text. Now I'm gonna apply a stroke to that text. Same thing again, I'm going to set it to 1.5. And then I'm gonna change the type of stroke so that instead of it being a solid line, it's a dotted line. And I'm gonna select a color that matches with the blue fill gradient that I'm using on the text, let's go with this color, and now I have recreated this styling here on this text. So if you want to get a bit more colorful, say with a large title that you're gonna be using on a title slide, then that's how you can do it using the text art tools. And just remember that if you've gone to a bunch of trouble to design a nice style and you need to reuse it somewhere else, just use that copy and paste styles functionality. Okay, so that is all of your text insertion and styling tools in OnlyOffice Presentations. The next thing that we're gonna check out is working with images. We're gonna see the different ways that you have available to add images into a slide, and then we're gonna look at the ways that you have to edit those images, both basic editing and a little more advanced editing. So we're gonna go through that in the next lesson. I'll see you there.