How to automatically make coloured box behind text

[gizmo2501]

Hi there,

I wondered if anyone can help with this in Affinity Photo.

I often create graphics with text that have coloured rectangle boxes behind them. I have been doing this manually - adding a text layer, then adding a rectangle layer, making it the right size, aligning it with the text and then colouring.

Does anyone know of a quicker way to do this, preferably so that you can auto-align and choose the padding around the text for the box?

I have attached the kind of thing I am talking about.

Thank you!

 

[Joachim_L]

27 minutes ago, gizmo2501 said:

Does anyone know of a quicker way to do this, preferably so that you can auto-align and choose the padding around the text for the box?

There would be a quicker way if you also have APu installed. There you can make different boxes with padding, fill etc. put all in a Styles Category and import this Style Category in AP ... but there is a bug in this. The vertical alignment information gets lost on the way from APu to AP. So you have to Edit in Publisher again.

[G13RL]

Hello gizmo2501,

I don't know if this will work for you, but you can try "Background Colour" in the "Character" tab of the studio. The highlighting automatically adapts to the text you can change, and you can choose its color.
The only problem in your case is that it sticks to the text on the right and on the left, you can type a space before and after the text to enlarge the rectangle horizontally (possibly changing the font size for these two spaces).

[gizmo2501]

2 hours ago, Joachim_L said:

There would be a quicker way if you also have APu installed. There you can make different boxes with padding, fill etc. put all in a Styles Category and import this Style Category in AP ... but there is a bug in this. The vertical alignment information gets lost on the way from APu to AP. So you have to Edit in Publisher again.

Thanks, that's useful information for the future! May have to get Publisher now to see these other tricks.

[gizmo2501]

50 minutes ago, G13RL said:

Hello gizmo2501,

I don't know if this will work for you, but you can try "Background Colour" in the "Character" tab of the studio. The highlighting automatically adapts to the text you can change, and you can choose its color.
The only problem in your case is that it sticks to the text on the right and on the left, you can type a space before and after the text to enlarge the rectangle horizontally (possibly changing the font size for these two spaces).

 

Ahha! Great! That worked!

 

I can't believe I didn't see that box before. So obvious now.

 

Thanks for your help!

 

Hopefully they will add an option to pad the background from top and bottom in the future.

[G13RL]

@gizmo2501 thank you for the feedback.

[GuyMiklos]

There are three ways I have found to do this, the first in A.Designer, and two ways in A.Pub. from which the results can be copied and pasted into A.Designer or Photo. 

Method 1 is to do as you were doing. Create a Text Frame and Rectangle. Colour the rectangle. Group the two of them and add the group to your Assets panel. Grouped objects resize together using the extended handle on the bottom right corner.

Method 2 is show the window/panel/studio for Text Frame in which you define the frame and fill colour. The frame still needs to be adjusted in size if the text overflows.

Method 3 is to show the window/panel/studio for Text Style and define a style for say "My Boxed Text" and edit the style's Decoration panel (bottom in the list of edit options).  The box thus defined will grow to surround text that overflows from its text frame.

Hope this helps anyone with the same query.