Font and text style

The Font and Style sections of the Text sub-tab set how a text clip’s words look. Select a text clip to reach them. Both start closed, so click a header to open its section. The Font header shows the size and the Style header shows the alignment.

Where: Clip tab ▸ Text ▸ FontClip tab ▸ Text ▸ Style
Agent tools: set_text

Choose a font

Family lists every font family installed on your Mac, plus the ones Frame Job ships with: Source Sans 3, Source Serif 4, Montserrat, Anton, Bebas Neue, Darker Grotesque and IBM Plex Mono.

Style lists the faces of that family, such as Regular or SemiBold.

When you change Family, Frame Job keeps the current style if the new family has one of that name. Otherwise it uses Regular, or the family’s first style if it has no Regular. Both controls make an undo step called Font.

See Fonts for more on the faces.

Set the size

Size runs from 6 to 800 px, and a new clip starts at 72 px. Type a value or use the quick picks: 24, 36, 48, 72, 96 and 144.

The size is in canvas pixels, so the same number looks smaller on a larger canvas. For a size worked out from the canvas, use a preset.

Set the colour

Color is white by default. Click its swatch to open the colour panel, and set the colour and its opacity there.

Align the text

Control	Choices	Default
Align	L, C or R	Centre
Vertical	Top, middle or bottom of the box	Middle

Both make an undo step called Alignment.

With the box on Auto-size, the box is as wide as the longest line, so Align lines up the shorter lines and a single line doesn’t move. In a fixed-width box, it places every line in the box. To move the text itself, drag it on the canvas or use Transform.

A text box is always as tall as its words, so Vertical moves the text by a pixel or two at most.

Show the text in capitals

Tick UPPERCASE to draw the text in capitals. What you typed is kept as you typed it, so unticking the box brings it back. It never changes the number of words, so it’s safe on captions timed word by word.

The canvas text editor shows the text as you typed it, not in capitals.

Adjust the spacing

Control	What it does	Default	Range
Line spacing	The space between lines, as a multiple of the font’s line height	1×	0.5 to 4×
Tracking	Extra space between letters. Below 0 pulls them together.	0 px	−20 to 100 px

Reset the style

Reset in the Style section’s header puts everything in that section back, in one undo step called Text Style:

Color to white
Align to centre and Vertical to middle
UPPERCASE off
Line spacing to 1× and Tracking to 0 px

It shows while something in the section differs from those values and no action is selected. It doesn’t touch the font or the size, and the Font section has no Reset of its own. To put Size back to 72 px, right-click its label and choose Reset to default.

Change the style during a clip

With an action selected, these controls set the look at that action’s end. Size, Color, Line spacing and Tracking ease towards the new value, and colours blend in OKLab. Family, Style, Align, Vertical and UPPERCASE switch when the action ends.

With an agent

An agent names a font by its one PostScript name, such as SourceSans3-Bold, rather than by family and style. A colour is four numbers from 0 to 1: red, green, blue and opacity. Align is align (left, center or right), Vertical is valign (top, middle or bottom), and UPPERCASE is case (as_written or upper).

An agent isn’t held to the ranges above: a size or line spacing only has to be above 0, and tracking can be any number. See Tools: text, shapes and clip names.

Good to know

A project can name a font this Mac doesn’t have. The Text sub-tab still opens, showing the first family in the list, and the text draws in a substitute until you install the font or choose another.