ScisType
Type in Scissor stays live: you can re-edit the words, the font and the spacing at any point, and the text is drawn straight onto the canvas as you type. The shortcuts below are written in their macOS form; on Windows read ⌘ as Ctrl, ⌥ as Alt and ⇧ as Shift.
Making type
The type tools share one slot in the toolbar.
| Tool | Shortcut | What it does |
|---|---|---|
| Type Tool | T | Click for point type, drag for a rectangular frame of area type |
| Area Type Tool | Drag out a frame and type into it | |
| Type on a Path Tool | Click a path to run type along it | |
| Vertical Type Tool | Sets upright characters into columns | |
| Touch Type Tool | ⇧T | Moves, resizes and turns one character at a time |
Click existing type with any of the type tools except Touch Type to put the cursor in it, or double-click it with the Selection Tool (V). Press Escape, or click away, to stop editing. With the plain Type Tool, clicking an open path attaches type to that path rather than starting a new block. Use Type > Type Orientation to turn existing type between horizontal and vertical.
Type on a path
Click a path with the Type on a Path Tool. The path becomes the baseline and stops being artwork in its own right, so it is no longer filled or stroked. Select the result and three brackets appear: one at the start, one at the end and one in the middle. Drag the start or end bracket to move where the type begins and ends along the path, drag the middle bracket to slide the whole run along, and drag the middle bracket across to the other side of the path to flip the type over. Type on a path takes no line breaks, so Return does nothing while you edit it.
Touch Type
Pick the Touch Type Tool and click a character. A box appears around that one character with a knob at each corner, one on the right-hand side, one at the bottom and one floating above. Drag a corner to scale in both directions, the side knob for width alone, the bottom knob for height alone, and the top knob to turn the character. Hold ⇧ while dragging a corner to keep the proportions, or while turning to snap the angle. Backspace or Delete puts the character back where the text set it, and Escape drops the pick. The text is still text throughout: you can carry on editing the words around the character you moved.
Character and Paragraph
The Character panel (⌘T) holds the font family, weight and italic, size, leading, tracking in thousandths of an em, the four alignments and the writing direction. Leaving leading at 0 gives automatic leading at 120% of the size. Under OpenType are buttons for standard ligatures, discretionary ligatures, all caps, small caps, superscript, subscript, fractions, ordinals, swash and kerning, with a menu for figure style: default, tabular lining, proportional oldstyle, proportional lining or tabular oldstyle. Ligatures, kerning, caps and super- and subscript are drawn on the canvas; discretionary ligatures, figure styles, fractions, ordinals and swash are carried into SVG export, which the canvas cannot show.
The Paragraph panel (⌥⌘T) has seven alignment buttons - left, centre, right, and justification with the last line left, centred, right or justified as well - along with left, right and first-line indents, space before and after, and a hyphenation switch. A negative first-line indent hangs the line out. Indents and spacing apply to area type; point type is set from its own anchor.
The Glyphs panel (Type > Glyphs, ⌥⇧F11) lists the characters of the current font by set, from Basic Latin through Greek, Cyrillic, Hebrew, Arabic, punctuation, currency, arrows and more, and keeps the ones you have used recently. Double-click a glyph to type it at the text cursor; with no cursor in any type, it is copied to the clipboard instead.
Threading and text wrap
Select two or more area type objects and choose Type > Threaded Text > Create. Their text is joined into one story that flows from frame to frame, back to front, and is always edited from the first frame. Each frame shows a port at its top left and bottom right, with a line drawn to the frame the text continues in; a red plus in place of the outgoing port means more text than the frame can hold. Release Selection takes the selected frames out of their thread, and Remove Threading breaks the thread with each frame keeping the text it was showing.
To push type away from a shape, select the shape and choose Object > Text Wrap > Make. The wrap follows the object's outline, not its bounding box. Text Wrap Options… sets the offset in pixels and can invert the wrap so the type runs inside the shape instead of around it; Release removes it.
Outlines
Select some type and choose Type > Create Outlines (⇧⌘O) to turn it into paths. The letterforms are traced from the font's own glyphs at high resolution with corner-aware curve fitting, and the result keeps the type's fill, stroke, name, opacity and blending mode. The words are no longer editable afterwards, so keep a copy if you may need to change them, or undo with ⌘Z.
Right-to-left and Arabic
The Character panel's direction menu offers Auto, Left to Right and Right to Left. On Auto the direction is read from the text itself, so Arabic or Hebrew flows right to left without being set. Arabic letters take their joined forms, and a run of Latin words inside a right-to-left line keeps its own left-to-right order. Right-to-left text works on a path as well as in point and area type, and the on-canvas editor follows the same direction as the finished artwork.