Text box and wrapping

A text clip’s box decides where its lines break. By default the box fits the words, and only your own line breaks start a new line. Give it a fixed width and the words wrap to fit.

Where: Clip tab ▸ Text ▸ BoxDrag a text clip's left or right handle on the canvas
Agent tools: set_text

Wrap text at a width

Select the text clip.
In the inspector’s Clip tab, open the Box section of the Text sub-tab.
Set Mode to Fixed width. The width starts at 60 % of the canvas width, which is 1,152 px on a 1920-wide canvas.
Type a Width, or drag a side handle on the canvas.

To go back, set Mode to Auto-size or choose the section’s Reset.

The Box section

Control	What it does	Default	Range
Mode	Auto-size lays the text out without wrapping, so the box fits the words. Fixed width wraps the words at Width.	Auto-size
Width	The width the words wrap at. It’s greyed in Auto-size.	60 % of the canvas width	20 to 20,000 px

A number typed outside the range is brought back to the nearest limit. When the section is closed, its header reads “auto”, or the width, such as “1152 px”.

Drag the width on the canvas

Drag a text clip’s left or right handle in the preview to set its wrap width. If the box was on Auto-size, it becomes Fixed width, starting from the box’s current width.

The text stays centred on the same point and grows both ways, whichever handle you drag. The drag holds the width between 4 and 20,000 px, so it can go narrower than the 20 px the Width field lets you type.

The other handles do something different. The corners and the top and bottom handles scale the text uniformly and leave the wrap width alone. See Move, scale and rotate.

What a fixed width changes

The height follows the lines. A fixed width sets only the width, and the box grows taller as the text wraps onto more lines.
Alignment works across the whole width. Left, centre and right alignment line the words up against the width you set, not against the longest line.
A backdrop fills the whole box. A backdrop is as wide as Width plus its padding on each side, even when the words are shorter. Width measures the words, and the padding sits outside it.

Good to know

In Auto-size a long line never wraps, so it can run off the canvas. Press ⇧Return in the text area to start a new line yourself.
Text is drawn at no more than 8,192 px on a side, so a box stops growing there whatever Width says.
With an action selected, Mode, Width and the side handles set the action’s end, like any other text property.

With an agent

set_text sets the box through width: a wrap width in pixels, or null to go back to Auto-size. See Tools: text, shapes and clip names.