Text & typography
Character & paragraph formatting
Every type control lives in the Properties panel while a text frame is selected. What you change depends on what you have selected — a run of characters, or the whole frame. This page walks through both.
Character vs. paragraph
Formatting in Popcorn Editor works at two levels, and the trick is knowing which one you're touching:
- Character formatting (size, weight, color, italic) can apply to a selected run of text. Double-click into a frame, drag to highlight a few words, and only those change.
- Paragraph formatting (alignment, line height, indents, lists) always applies to whole paragraphs — the ones your cursor or selection touches.
When you've highlighted a range inside a frame, an Editing selection indicator appears so
you know your edits are scoped to that run rather than the entire element. Click away or
press Esc to deselect and format the frame as a whole.
Size & weight
Set the type size in the Size field. On print (physical-unit) documents this reads in points (pt) — the standard type measure — while screen (pixel) documents read in pixels (px). Pick a Weight from the dropdown: Thin, Light, Regular, Medium, Semibold, Bold, or Extra Bold.
Only weights the font actually ships apply cleanly. If a family has no Semibold cut, choosing it falls back to the nearest real weight rather than faking one. See Fonts & the Font Book for choosing families.
Style toggles
A compact segment holds Italic, Underline, and Strikethrough — each can apply to a selected run. Next to them, All Caps renders the text in capitals without changing the underlying characters (it's an element-level toggle, so it affects the whole frame).
Case & script
Need to actually rewrite the letters, not just display them differently? Use UPPERCASE and lowercase to change the case of selected characters, and Superscript or Subscript to raise or lower a run (great for x², footnote marks, or H₂O). Case can be set per character; super- and subscript need a selection while you're editing text.
OpenType features
Expand the OpenType section for real glyph-level typography — these use the font's own GSUB shaping tables, so they're genuine alternates, not visual fakes:
| Feature | What it does |
|---|---|
| Ligatures | Joins letter pairs like fi and fl into single glyphs |
| Small Caps | Capital shapes at lowercase height |
| Figures & Fig. Width | Switch between lining/oldstyle and proportional/tabular numerals |
| Fractions | Turns 1/2 into a true stacked fraction |
| Ordinals | Raises the letters in 1st, 2nd |
| Slashed 0 | A zero with a slash, so it can't be read as an O |
| Style Set | Font-specific stylistic alternates, chosen from the dropdown |
Any feature the current font doesn't provide is grayed out and labeled — not in this font, so you always know what's really available.
Color & stroke
Set the text fill with Color, which opens the swatch picker and accepts spot colors as well as process ones. You can also add a Stroke color with a Stroke width, drawn around the outside of the letters for outlined type. For how fills, strokes and named swatches work, see Color basics and Swatches.
Tracking
Tracking sets the letter spacing across a run — tighten a headline or open up small caps. While you're editing with a collapsed cursor between two letters, the panel also shows the kerning pair reading at that spot, so you can nudge individual pairs precisely.
Alignment
Alignment is per-paragraph: Align left, Align horizontal center (center), Align right, or Justify. Justify spreads every line flush to both edges except the last line of each paragraph.
Line height & spacing
- Line Ht. sets the leading — the vertical space between lines within a paragraph.
- Space before and Space after add breathing room between paragraphs, which is a cleaner way to separate blocks than pressing Return twice.
Indents
Three fields shape the paragraph's edges:
- First line indents only the opening line. A negative value creates a hanging indent, where the first line sits to the left of the rest — the classic look for definitions and bullet-style layouts.
- Indent L pushes the whole paragraph in from the left.
- Indent R pulls it in from the right.
A hanging indent (negative First line plus a matching Indent L) keeps wrapped lines aligned neatly under the text, not under the bullet or number.
Lists
Turn a paragraph into a list with the Bulleted list or Numbered list toggle. From there:
- Indent (Tab) nests an item one level deeper; Outdent (Shift+Tab) promotes it back.
- The Marker dropdown picks the symbol or numbering style —
1.01.a.A.i.I.for numbered lists, or•◦▪–»for bulleted ones. - For an ordered list, Restart numbering here makes the current item begin a fresh count at 1.
Next steps
Once you've dialed in a look you'll reuse, save it as a reusable named style so every heading or caption stays consistent — see Paragraph & character styles. To flow long copy into columns or across linked frames, head to Columns & threading text.