Text Style Panel Archives

Have you heard of Glyphs? These are special characters that some fonts have included with them. Glyphs can be flourishes, fancy letters, punctuation or characters with accents, shapes, etc.

With the software Silhouette Studio version of v4.1.197 and the Designer Edition software upgrade, came the option to unlock the glyphs feature in Silhouette Studio. This is amazing as I had such a hard time with the small Character map on my PC.

Access the Glyphs panel on the second tab of the Test Style Panel on the right side of Silhouette Studio v4.

Let’s Explore the glyphs tab in the Text Style Panel!

Text Search bar – Just like on Tab 1, the name of the font that is selected will appear in this box or you can highlight it and type a name in the box and it will select that font.
Glyphs – This area is where you will see the glyphs of the font that you are using show up. Note: sometimes not all the glyphs will show up here and you will need to access those through Character Map (PC) or Fontbook (Mac). It just depends on how the font was created.
Recently Used Glyphs – This handy feature shows the ones you have recently accessed.
Icon size – You can change the size of how the Icons appear in the glyphs panel. And when you hover over a glyph it magnifies it as well.

Now, there is still 1 more tab option in the Text Style Panel and it’s a good one.

Spellcheck

If you type out a word that is either not in the dictionary or is not spelled correctly, you will see a green squiggly line show up under it. Here I’ve typed my business name with no space. That is not in the dictionary, so it let’s me know that.

If I want to add that word to my dictionary, I can right click on it and choose “Add ‘SilhouetteSecrets’ to Dictionary”.

Once it is added to the dictionary, the green line disappears.

So let’s explore the Spelling Panel.

If you type out several words which are misspelled (which is very hard for me to do on purpose), you will notice the green squiggly lines under those that are not in the dictionary.

Click on Replace and it will pop up a list of suggestions to replace it with. Choose the one you want, click on Replace again and it will change it.

If you know the word is spelled correctly, choose Add to Dictionary and the green line will disappear. This word has now been added to your Silhouette dictionary.

The Arrows at the top of the panel are the Undo and Redo buttons, in case you picked the wrong replacement word, you can simply Undo it.

And then you have some Advanced options.

Automatic Spellchecking – check it on or off.
Select Language – Select your default language.
Custom Dictionary – Any words you add to the dictionary will appear here.
Text box – Type in a new word to add it to your dictionary.

If you ever need to delete a word you have added to the Dictionary, click on the word and the delete option will show up.

And there you have all of the Text Style Panel. Keep in mind that the Glyphs panel is an option available to you when you upgrade the software to Designer Edition or higher.

Check out the other posts in the Let’s Explore v4 Series HERE.

Enjoy !

THANK YOU for your support! How can you help? Click HERE & buy a coffee. Every little bit helps with the cost of running the site.

Looking for more in-depth, step-by-step classes, check out all of my online Silhouette classes on my Teachable site HERE.

Let’s talk about text – the Text Style Panel!

Silhouette Studio software will pull in any font that you have installed on your computer. Once it’s installed, a text style name should show up in the Text Style Panel.

Let’s take a look.

Text Search bar – The name of the font that is selected will appear in this box or you can highlight it and type a name in the box and it will select that font.
Text Size – Use the drop down box to change the text size smaller or larger here or highlight and type in a new number to change the pt size.
Text Style Panel – The first 2 sections to appear in the Panel are the “Frequently Used” and “Recently Used” sections. You may have other sections in the Panel because you’ve created folders in your Fonts folder in the Silhouette cloud library. When you choose a font style for your text, the font style name will be highlighted.
Text Properties – If a font has the options, choose Bold, Italic or Underlined here. Some text styles may have additional options available and the drop down box next to U will be available to select.
Text Alignment – Choose your text to be align left (default), align centered, align right or Full.
Horizontal/Vertical Text – Choose whether your text runs horizontally or vertically on your design mat.
Line Spacing – Increase or decrease the space between each line of text. This will affect text created in the same text box.
Character Spacing – Increase or decrease the spacing between each character. This can come in handy when you are trying to weld something and the letters do not overlap.
Kerning – This feature adjusts the spacing between letters to make them look better, such as AW or AV. Instead of having such a wide space between then, you can turn the Kern on and they move closer together.

Now, let’s talk a little about how to create with Text.

First click on the Text Tool on the left side of the Silhouette Software. Click on the design mat & type out the words. Click off of the words to deselect it and then click back on the text once to select it. Fill the text with color to make it easier to see & work with. Click on the Text Style Panel on the right side.

Now, click on a Font Style Name, the text will change to that font style. You can then either click on each font, use the text search bar if you know what you are looking for or use the arrow keys to scroll through the text list and as you do the words will change to each font – this is my favorite method if I don’t know what font I want.

You will notice that I have red lines still going through my letters. Because my letters are overlapping, I want to weld this before I cut so that it will cut anything part that overlaps as one piece. Right click on the design and choose Weld.

This will change the text from editable text to a vector image, so you might want to make a copy and pull it off your mat before welding. Once it’s welded, you will see that any piece that was not overlapping will have now become it’s own separate section with a bounding box around it.

To keep the pieces together, we want to Group. There are several ways to Group – right click & choose Group, Ctrl (Cmd) + G, Object tab at top & Group or use the QAT (Quick Access Toolbar) at the top and select the Group icon.

And now your font is ready to cut.

I hope that helps to explain the different parts of the Text Style Panel and how to create text designs.

If you want to learn even more about text and how to get accurate text sizes, check out my guest post on Silhouette School’s blog about Forcing Accurate Text Size.

Check out the other posts in the Let’s Explore v4 Series HERE.

Enjoy !

THANK YOU for your support! How can you help? Click HERE & buy a coffee. Every little bit helps with the cost of running the site.

Looking for more in-depth, step-by-step classes, check out all of my online Silhouette classes on my Teachable site HERE.