How to use a text frame's background fill instead of text for alignment?

[zmitchell]

I've created a text frame and given both the text and the background a color. I place a guide line for alignment purposes and then try to snap the text frame up against the guide, but it snaps to the text instead of the background fill. This makes sense because it's consistent with how the alignment would look without a background fill, but when you do have a background fill it now spills over the alignment guide.

Is there a better way of aligning text frames, or is there a way to use the background fill as the reference for alignment rather than the text's bounding box?

[thomaso]

Hi @zmitchell,
welcome to the Affinity forums!

You have a bunch of options to adjust the default position of text within its frame, respectively the position of a text's background decoration fill. For instance below with indent (left) + space before (top) … while the text frame options are not used in this sample. It enables you to make the background fill snap together with the frame bounding box. To make it snap to a baseline grid you can use additionally the character baseline shift (Character Panel). Note that character and paragraph settings can get saved with a text style – while text frame options don't.

[zmitchell]

Thanks, that's a step in the right direction. Is there a way to set the "size"/width/height of the background fill independently of the font size? I'm wondering if it's just simpler to create a rectangle with the desired fill and position a text frame inside of it.

[walt.farrell]

1 minute ago, zmitchell said:

Thanks, that's a step in the right direction. Is there a way to set the "size"/width/height of the background fill independently of the font size? I'm wondering if it's just simpler to create a rectangle with the desired fill and position a text frame inside of it.

Perhaps you should consider Artistic Text rather than Frame Text?