Weird looking default text

[razorpig]

It's either a bug or more likely I've clicked something by accident, but my default text has a dark blue background (see attached). It's likely a silly oversight but I can't get rid of it. To create new text I'm just duplicating and editing a piece of text that looks normal. So annoying ! 🙂Any ideas?

[Ron P.]

 

6 hours ago, razorpig said:

To create new text I'm just duplicating and editing a piece of text that looks normal

Does the text you're duplicating have the background color? To remove the background color, open the Character Studio.

 

Here's the On-Line Help for Designer, DEFAULTS

[razorpig]

Hi Ron,

There's no background colour assigned in the character panel when I add new text (see attached) - that's what I don't understand. The only way I can create normal text is to copy some that looks OK. Any text I add using the artistic text tool has that dark background, even though it looks fine in the character panel ??? I'm stumped !

[carl123]

Try...

Edit > Defaults > Revert

and create a new text object

If that does not work, we can try another way

 

[razorpig]

@carl123 Fantastic ! That worked 👍 Thank you. For anyone else having the same issue, I first had to revert then save the defaults.

[thomaso]

15 minutes ago, razorpig said:

For anyone else having the same issue, I first had to revert then save the defaults.

Usually you do not need to save Defaults here. It is a feature in Affinity to keep a most recent style in memory and use it for further, new objects, too. This way you can create a series of objects without the need to style each of them from scratch. – Resetting to Defaults does reset a bunch of parameters, not colour only, for instance font family, font size, paragraph leading, etc.

If the background colour is neither assigned as Character Style nor as Paragraph Decoration then it is quite likely a Text Frame Fill Colour (for instance if an object got copied from / file got opened in APub). To remove the background colour open the file in APub and reset the frame fill colour.

[razorpig]

@thomaso Thanks for the additional info. Very useful. This was only happening in a few documents. When I find another one with the same issue I'll check the Paragraph Decoration - this is something I didn't check before. It was happening with the Artistic Text tool, not the Text Frame tool.

Also, now that you mention it - I think maybe I didn't save the defaults, but just re-saved the document. I definitely saved something ! I'll double check when I come across another document with the same issue and report back. Thanks again ! 

[thomaso]

6 minutes ago, razorpig said:

It was happening with the Artistic Text tool, not the Text Frame tool.

Doesn't matter. They both are Text Frame objects and both types can get a fill colour assigned.

[R C-R]

5 hours ago, thomaso said:

Doesn't matter. They both are Text Frame objects and both types can get a fill colour assigned.

Maybe less confusing to just say they are both Text objects, & leave out the word "Frame"?

[thomaso]

2 hours ago, R C-R said:

Maybe less confusing to just say they are both Text objects, & leave out the word "Frame"?

To me it feels rather fundamental to know / understand that both are Frame objects, which allow to get fill & stroke assigned independently of fill & stroke for their text itself – different to curved text for instance which has a rectangular bounding box, too, but no editable frame (which could get fill or stroke assigned).

For instance a Pixel image Layer is an object which can not get fill & stroke assigned – whereas an Image Layer can and has / is a frame, too. While both types can be used inside a Picture Frame object (which actually seems to be able to contain various object types, e.g. pixel, vector and text frames, too.)

In this view, a simplified language could lead to even more confusion in the complexity of options.

EDIT: Confusion inside a Picture Frame: to say text "object" rather than "frame" wouldn't make things easier. Yes, it is quite odd but it may illustrate eventually confusion which might not get reduced by using more general, less specific terms.