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Installing and changing the font in Krita can be understood in a few simple steps. However, it is important to first understand the basic formatting tools provided by Krita, including the text tool which will be discussed in detail.

What is Krita?

Krita is an open source digital art studio, where professional artists can create illustrations, comics, concept and more. Created by a community of artists and developers in the Kool Desktop Environment (KDE) project, Krita is part of the Calligra Suite of creative applications. Artists have the option to create art from scratch or use existing resources, which makes it a flexible and fast painting application.

The application comes with unique features like multihand and mirrored painting, which makes it easier to create comics, concept art, storyboards, textures, matte paintings and illustrations. The powerful brush engines provide a full set of brushes, brush tips, besides a wide variety of patterns, palettes and gradients. Additionally, there are also many plugins available, ranging from filters to painting assistants.

Besides these features, Krita also has vector and raster tools. Some of the vector tools included in the software are path, selection, text, artistic text, calligraphy, fill and gradient. The Raster tools provided with the software include freehand, line, multihand, crop, move, colour picker, zoom, pan and many more.

What is typography?

Crafting and selecting the right lettering and design is one of the most important aspects in graphic design and digital art. Typography can be defined as the arrangement of text and letters in a way that not only makes them clear and legible, but also visually appealing to the reader. Typography plays an emotive role in every design, and includes font appearance, font size and structure.

History of typography

Up until the 1800s, typography was a specialized occupation, which often required the skillset and craftsmanship of a type creator and a typesetter. The letters that resulted from years of work were then made into metal blocks. The resulting typefaces, which included the design of lettering, were then turned into fonts, which were sold to printmakers shops. The next task in the process would be the typesetters’, who would then set the fonts and decide on the spacing, so as to enhance the readability. For the purpose of spacing, they used spacers which were made of lead. This is why the process of adding space came to be known as leading. Both the fonts and leading were measured in points of 10, 12 and 14. Besides this, variations were also added in the weight of the fonts, which could be bold, regular, or light.

In the present digital age, type creators are not bound by the physical constraints of the earlier days. With easier access to lightning-fast computers, the art of typography has become simple. The credit for revolutionizing the world of digital typography has to be given to Adobe. The PostScript language, which was created by Adobe, was the first printing software that enabled users to print pages that included text, line art, and digitized photos. Before the introduction of PostScript, one needed to buy a system along with a special device for the purpose of typesetting.

Elements of typography

Following are certain elements, which contribute significantly to the art of lettering –

  • Typeface and font: A typeface consists of a set of characters that are designed to make up a complete set of type. It consists of a variety of characters, in different sizes and weights. Typefaces can be classified into serif, sans serif, script, monospaced, and display. A font, on the other hand, refers to styles, weights and widths of a typeface. Simply put, it is a graphic representation of text characters.
  • Contrast: Contrast is a key element that helps in highlighting the idea a designer wants to communicate. It is what makes the text interesting, meaningful and attention-grabbing. Integrating the element of contrast in a text can be done by varying the size, typeface, weight, colour and style, in a way that would make the design impactful.
  • Colour: The colour of a text needs to be such that it balances the three key components of value, hue, and saturation. The resulting text should be both legible and eye-catching.
  • Leading- The vertical space between each line of words is what is known as Leading. The leading value is the distance between the two lines of text, and it is usually more than the font size.
  • Tracking- It is also known as letter spacing, and it refers to the space between the text characters. This space is called Kerning.
  • Line Length: It refers to the standard length of the text.
  • Hierarchy- It is one of the most important elements of typography. Hierarchy is what guides the reader to notice the headers, sub-headers and body types. The hierarchy value is determined by the size, which is done through the use of dimensions, spacing and colour.
  • Alignment- It helps in unifying the various elements of a text to ensure symmetry in size and space.
  • White space- It refers to the ‘negative space’ around text. Ensuring the proper use of white space enhances the readability of the text.

Typography in Krita

The text tool in Krita allows the addition of text in artwork. It contains features with which to create new texts, and change font, size in pt (points), text alignment, letter spacing, colour and so on. The text editor in Krita comes with two modes – Rich Text and SVG source. The Rich Text Editor allows editing and formatting of content without the use of HTML tags, and is useful for those unfamiliar with SVG text. The SVG text editor allows more functionality, which comes with enabling SVG source. The SVG text element includes the graphics element of a text, which makes it possible to apply a clipping path, mask, gradient, pattern, or filter to the text.

Text tool

The text tool in Krita allows one to filter the selection of fonts, under the fonts setting. To understand how to change a font, it is important to first familiarize oneself with creating a text.

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How to create a text in Krita

  • Step 1- After opening Krita, select “New” from the File option to create a new document. This opens up a white Krita canvas.
  • Step 2- After selecting the text tool, press the left mouse button and then drag it to create a rectangular selection on the canvas. When the left mouse button is released, a default text is created.
  • Step 3- The text editor window pops-up, where the default text can be deleted, and new text can be added.
  • Step 4- One can also make various changes to the text, like font style, size, text boldness and so on.
  • Step 5- After making the changes, click save in the lower right corner of the text editor and close.

How to change font in Krita

After following the aforementioned steps of creating a text, you can click on the edit text option to change the font of the text you created. When you open the text editor, Krita shows the fonts that are already installed in the operating system.

Krita usually comes with a few fonts built into its database. You can also download new fonts from third-party sources. To use a new font in Krita, you have to install the font with the steps required for that particular operating system.

Downloading fonts

While creating digital art, there are times we want to use specific type of fonts to give our content the desired look, feel, and readability. There are several great resources online which offer downloadable fonts. Once the font has been selected, you can download a .zip file, which contains the font file and other associated files. These associated files may include text files containing license and copyright information and image samples of what the font looks like.

The file containing the fonts can be in one of the following formats.

  • Embedded Open Type: This font format usually has a .eot extension, which stands for Embedded Open Type. This font format was made by Microsoft, as a compact form of Open Type fonts. The font files are made small in size by data compression and subsetting.
  • TrueType Font and OpenType Font: These font formats come with the extensions, .ttf and .otf, which stand for TrueType Font and OpenType Font, respectively. They are dual-purpose font types meant to work for both printers and screens. OpenType Font comes with a few extra features like extra space to include more characters, as they are the newer version of TrueType Fonts.
  • Web Open Font Format: This font format usually has a .woff or .woff2 extension, which stands for Web Open Font Format. This font format was specifically made for use by Mozilla. They are gaining widespread popularity lately, with the World Wide Web Consortium stating that it expected Web Open Font Format to eventually become the most widely used font format for all browsers. This font types are compressed versions of TrueType Font and OpenType Font, which is why they usually load the fastest.
  • Scalable Vector Graphics: This font format has a .svg extension, which stands for Scalable Vector Graphics. They are vector re-creations of a typeface, and are much smaller in file size.

Locating the installed fonts

Locating the font file in OSx:

  • Step 1 – On the desktop, and press the command key and spacebar at the same time. This brings up the Spotlight Search function.
  • Step 2 – Type the name of the font file into the Spotlight Search. You can identify that a certain file is a font file by looking at its extension, which could be .ttf or .otf or .woff.
  • Step 3 – After you have found your font file, you can move it to your desktop or save it in an easily locatable folder for further use.

Locating the font in Windows:

  • Step 1 – Find the Control Panel from the search prompt located in the bottom-left corner of your desktop.
  • Step 2 – In the Control Panel, click on “Appearance and Personalization” and scroll down until you find a folder called “Fonts”.
  • Step 3 – After you open the Fonts folder, scroll down to find the font you are looking for.
  • Step 4 – After you have found your font file, you can drag it to your desktop or save it in an easily locatable folder for further use.

Installing fonts

§ Installing new fonts in Windows:

  • After downloading fonts from a third-party source, extract the font files if they are in a zip folder.
  • Right-click the files and use the “Install” option
  • In case the “install” option does not appear, you can open the control panel and search for the fonts.
  • After locating the fonts, move them to the fonts manager window.

§ Installing new fonts on Linux:

  • Open the font viewer by double-clicking the font and click on the install button.
  • If the install button does not appear, copy the downloaded fonts and paste them in /home/your-username/.local/share/fonts directory.

§ Installing new fonts on OSx:

  • Double-click the font to see the preview and click the install font button.
  • If there is no install font button, click the “go to” in the finder and press option and shift keys. This will open up a hidden library folder.
  • Copy the fonts that had been downloaded and paste them in go to/users/your username/library/fonts.

Changing the font

Once the new fonts have been installed, you have restart Krita and check if they appear in the tool options while using the text tool. The process of installing the fonts is fairly simple. Now, the next step is changing the font, which is equally simple. Changing the font of a text in Krita can be done by following a few simple steps –

  • Create a text on a Krita canvas using a text tool.
  • After the text editor opens up, change the default text into the text you want.
  • From the font drop down menu, select the font you want to change your text into.
  • Click save and apply the changes