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How to change background color of text frame


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I use designer.

for example,
1. Make the rectangle object using 'Rectangle tool' and changed color of background (gray color).
2. Select the rectangle object (text frame) and 'convert to text frame' in right click menu.
3. Enter text.

* NOT Text color(Blue) or Text border color(Red), BUT text frame color(Gray, Rectangle object)

The one of way I know is below,
1. Select all text in text frame.
2. Cut(Ctrl + X) all text.
3. 'Convert to curve' in right click menu.
4. Change color of converted object.
5. Re-convert the object to text frame and Paste(Ctrl + V) all text earlier.

This way is too roundabout.
Please tell me, how to change the background color of text frame easily and directly.

thanks,

無題.png

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Hi reofkzw,

Welcome to the forums :)

In Affinity Designer, simply select the text you want to add a background to, then open the Character Studio (Either through View>Studio>Character or the icon on the context toolbar when text is selected). Here you can set the font & background colour for any text. I hope this helps!

Please Note: I am now out of the office until Tuesday 2nd April on annual leave.

If you require urgent assistance, please create a new thread and a member of our team will be sure to assist asap.

Many thanks :)

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12 hours ago, Dan C said:

In Affinity Designer, simply select the text you want to add a background to, then open the Character Studio (Either through View>Studio>Character or the icon on the context toolbar when text is selected). Here you can set the font & background colour for any text.

I was going to mention that this just replaces the text background color but does not fill the entire text frame with a fill color. I know that may not be what the OP wants, but while I was doing a quick check of this in AD 1.7.1 for Macs, I noticed something that seems odd.

I had already created a closed shape that was filled with yellow & stroked with black, so I decided to use that, right-clicking on it & choosing 'convert to text frame' from the menu, like the OP did. This did fill the frame with yellow, but now I can't see any way to change that. What am I missing?

All 3 1.10.8, & all 3 V2.4.1 Mac apps; 2020 iMac 27"; 3.8GHz i7, Radeon Pro 5700, 32GB RAM; macOS 10.15.7
Affinity Photo 
1.10.8; Affinity Designer 1.108; & all 3 V2 apps for iPad; 6th Generation iPad 32 GB; Apple Pencil; iPadOS 15.7

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5 hours ago, R C-R said:

This did fill the frame with yellow, but now I can't see any way to change that. What am I missing?

You're not missing anything, this is logged with our developers - the introduction of being able to colour the entire text box background in Publisher introduced this into Designer. As the ability to edit this is a Publisher Feature, there's no current easy way to change this once it's been set in Designer. You can of course create a new text frame, copy this, then paste style on the old text frame to remove the colour - but this only a temporary workaround.

Please Note: I am now out of the office until Tuesday 2nd April on annual leave.

If you require urgent assistance, please create a new thread and a member of our team will be sure to assist asap.

Many thanks :)

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  • 4 months later...
On 8/8/2019 at 5:29 AM, R C-R said:

I was going to mention that this just replaces the text background color but does not fill the entire text frame with a fill color. I know that may not be what the OP wants, but while I was doing a quick check of this in AD 1.7.1 for Macs, I noticed something that seems odd.

I had already created a closed shape that was filled with yellow & stroked with black, so I decided to use that, right-clicking on it & choosing 'convert to text frame' from the menu, like the OP did. This did fill the frame with yellow, but now I can't see any way to change that. What am I missing?

I use this hack: make object, colour it with Global colour, convert it to Text Frame, place text into it. Now I can change bg colour by editing Global colour. I think it's the easiest way for today.

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54 minutes ago, znids said:

I use this hack: make object, colour it with Global colour, convert it to Text Frame, place text into it. Now I can change bg colour by editing Global colour. I think it's the easiest way for today.

Welcome to the Serif Affinity forums, znids.

Simpler (to me):

  1. Color the object as you want.
  2. Duplicate it.
  3. Convert the top object to a text frame.
  4. Possibly Group the remaining object and the text frame.

-- Walt
Designer, Photo, and Publisher V1 and V2 at latest retail and beta releases
PC:
    Desktop:  Windows 11 Pro, version 23H2, 64GB memory, AMD Ryzen 9 5900 12-Core @ 3.00 GHz, NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3090 

    Laptop:  Windows 11 Pro, version 23H2, 32GB memory, Intel Core i7-10750H @ 2.60GHz, Intel UHD Graphics Comet Lake GT2 and NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070 Laptop GPU.
iPad:  iPad Pro M1, 12.9": iPadOS 17.4.1, Apple Pencil 2, Magic Keyboard 
Mac:  2023 M2 MacBook Air 15", 16GB memory, macOS Sonoma 14.4.1

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  • 5 months later...
On 12/21/2019 at 9:32 AM, znids said:

I use this hack: make object, colour it with Global colour, convert it to Text Frame, place text into it. Now I can change bg colour by editing Global colour. I think it's the easiest way for today.

This doesn't seem to work in v1.8. Once you convert your rectangular object to a text frame, it removes the background color. I can't believe there is no obvious way to tackle this. You've been able to do it since the old days of Quark and PageMaker. You create a text box, give it background color then choose text inset to add padding, etc. In Publisher, you have to create 2 blocks, one for background and one for text, then subtract the amount for inset on your text block? Is this a sick joke? When importing an IDML, text blocks with background color still remain in tact, but there's no way to modify the background color. They are not 2 grouped layers nor do they have a background character color. It's like the text is pasted inside the block, but there is no way to access the background. What's the secret?

Screen-Shot-25.jpg

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1 hour ago, djmtype said:

In Publisher, you have to create 2 blocks, one for background and one for text, then subtract the amount for inset on your text block? Is this a sick joke?

In Publisher it just works, with the one object, because (a) when you convert an object to a text frame the stroke and background (fill) are kept. You can make further adjustments if you need to using the Text Frame studio panel.

In Designer or Photo you need to duplicate your object, give one copy the stroke/fill you want, convert the other copy to a text frame, and group them.

-- Walt
Designer, Photo, and Publisher V1 and V2 at latest retail and beta releases
PC:
    Desktop:  Windows 11 Pro, version 23H2, 64GB memory, AMD Ryzen 9 5900 12-Core @ 3.00 GHz, NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3090 

    Laptop:  Windows 11 Pro, version 23H2, 32GB memory, Intel Core i7-10750H @ 2.60GHz, Intel UHD Graphics Comet Lake GT2 and NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070 Laptop GPU.
iPad:  iPad Pro M1, 12.9": iPadOS 17.4.1, Apple Pencil 2, Magic Keyboard 
Mac:  2023 M2 MacBook Air 15", 16GB memory, macOS Sonoma 14.4.1

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  • 3 months later...
On 5/28/2020 at 6:48 PM, walt.farrell said:

In Publisher it just works, with the one object, because (a) when you convert an object to a text frame the stroke and background (fill) are kept. You can make further adjustments if you need to using the Text Frame studio panel.

In Designer or Photo you need to duplicate your object, give one copy the stroke/fill you want, convert the other copy to a text frame, and group them.

Hi Walt, no unluckily it doesn't work that way. Once you convert the duplicated object into a text frame, the fill colour is reset to transparent and there's no more obvious way to edit it.

Any chance to have the old Text Frame properties button on the contextual tool bar like it was before?

2020-09-14_222510.png.419c8115243b427e064165605840af96.png

This is EXTRAORDINARILY FRUSTRATING!

Such tiny but HORRIBLY annoying bugs are those that make you regret spending your money on a different product than the "USUAL" ones.

Affinity Team Can you please do something about it before I revert to the Adobe Suite?

Thanks for your support and understanding.

Edited by pascar1973
typo
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1 hour ago, pascar1973 said:

, no unluckily it doesn't work that way. Once you convert the duplicated object into a text frame, the fill colour is reset to transparent and there's no more obvious way to edit it.

That's why you have a duplicate. One copy is a text frame, with no stroke or fill, which holds the text.

The other, underneath, has the stroke and fill.

-- Walt
Designer, Photo, and Publisher V1 and V2 at latest retail and beta releases
PC:
    Desktop:  Windows 11 Pro, version 23H2, 64GB memory, AMD Ryzen 9 5900 12-Core @ 3.00 GHz, NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3090 

    Laptop:  Windows 11 Pro, version 23H2, 32GB memory, Intel Core i7-10750H @ 2.60GHz, Intel UHD Graphics Comet Lake GT2 and NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070 Laptop GPU.
iPad:  iPad Pro M1, 12.9": iPadOS 17.4.1, Apple Pencil 2, Magic Keyboard 
Mac:  2023 M2 MacBook Air 15", 16GB memory, macOS Sonoma 14.4.1

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  • 2 months later...
On 8/8/2019 at 8:20 AM, Dan C said:

You're not missing anything, this is logged with our developers - the introduction of being able to colour the entire text box background in Publisher introduced this into Designer. As the ability to edit this is a Publisher Feature, there's no current easy way to change this once it's been set in Designer.

That editability should be in Designer also, not just Publisher, in my opinion. I doubt that Serif would lose sales of Publisher licences as a result of Text Frame panel being in Designer.

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  • 3 weeks later...

Just encounter the problem cannot edit the text frame fill color in Designer and Photo.

 

Start my file in Publishing. Never use the fill color option in Text Frame in Publishing when editing my file. After I finish with Publishing I open it with Designer (not the Designer Persona under Publishing). In Designer, whenever I create new text there was a fill background color. It was not the fill color under the Character tab. Was lost and find this post. Need to open the file in Publishing to turn off the Text Frame fill color. This is really annoying. Hope it can fix. Thank you.

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  • 3 weeks later...
On 12/4/2020 at 8:44 AM, anon2 said:

That editability should be in Designer also, not just Publisher, in my opinion. I doubt that Serif would lose sales of Publisher licences as a result of Text Frame panel being in Designer.

This defiantly needs to be fixed in Designer. If you have a text FRAME and are able to select a background colour, it should do just that.. change the background of the actual text FRAME.

This is very basic vector/text work.

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  • 1 month later...

Welcome to the forums @thejoshr.  He meant Text Frame Panel.  Go to View>Studio>Text Frame and be sure there is a check mark beside it ☺️


24" iMAC Apple M1 chip, 8-core CPU, 8-core GPU, 16 GB unified memory, 1 TB SSD storage, Ventura 13.6.  Photo, Publisher, Designer 1.10.5, and 2.3.
MacBook Pro 13" 2020, Apple M1 chip, 16GB unified memory, 256GB  SSD storage
,  Ventura 13.6.   Publisher, Photo, Designer 1.10.5, and 2.1.1.  
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1 hour ago, thejoshr said:

Hi Dan, i can't seem to find this palette or any other reference to it! where is it? thanks!

It is in Affinity Publisher only, so if you do not have that app you won't have it.

All 3 1.10.8, & all 3 V2.4.1 Mac apps; 2020 iMac 27"; 3.8GHz i7, Radeon Pro 5700, 32GB RAM; macOS 10.15.7
Affinity Photo 
1.10.8; Affinity Designer 1.108; & all 3 V2 apps for iPad; 6th Generation iPad 32 GB; Apple Pencil; iPadOS 15.7

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But the Character panel has a background color selection that is very similar.

-- Walt
Designer, Photo, and Publisher V1 and V2 at latest retail and beta releases
PC:
    Desktop:  Windows 11 Pro, version 23H2, 64GB memory, AMD Ryzen 9 5900 12-Core @ 3.00 GHz, NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3090 

    Laptop:  Windows 11 Pro, version 23H2, 32GB memory, Intel Core i7-10750H @ 2.60GHz, Intel UHD Graphics Comet Lake GT2 and NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070 Laptop GPU.
iPad:  iPad Pro M1, 12.9": iPadOS 17.4.1, Apple Pencil 2, Magic Keyboard 
Mac:  2023 M2 MacBook Air 15", 16GB memory, macOS Sonoma 14.4.1

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28 minutes ago, walt.farrell said:

But the Character panel has a background color selection that is very similar.

Not that similar. The character background color only fills the space the characters use. The Text Frame color fills the entire frame with color. Also note that the frame fill & character background colors do not line up at the top left of the frame.

1190594683_BGvsFill.jpg.d1bd6bfa3f5ed2535107996245963260.jpg

BG vs Fill.afdesign

All 3 1.10.8, & all 3 V2.4.1 Mac apps; 2020 iMac 27"; 3.8GHz i7, Radeon Pro 5700, 32GB RAM; macOS 10.15.7
Affinity Photo 
1.10.8; Affinity Designer 1.108; & all 3 V2 apps for iPad; 6th Generation iPad 32 GB; Apple Pencil; iPadOS 15.7

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  • 7 months later...
  • Staff
2 hours ago, pmi said:

I have the same problem with Affinity Designer,

Text Frame palette is missing

I can confirm that the Text Frame Studio is an Affinity Publisher feature only - this is why you cannot find the Studio in Designer & is by design.

I hope this clears things up :)

Please Note: I am now out of the office until Tuesday 2nd April on annual leave.

If you require urgent assistance, please create a new thread and a member of our team will be sure to assist asap.

Many thanks :)

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If you want a coloured background for a text frame just draw a rectangle behind it, colour it as you want, then group the text frame and rectangle.

Acer XC-895 : Core i5-10400 Hexa-core 2.90 GHz :  32GB RAM : Intel UHD Graphics 630 : Windows 10 Home
Affinity Publisher 2 : Affinity Photo 2 : Affinity Designer 2 : (latest release versions) on desktop and iPad

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