Text Editor

The text editor opens when you place or double-click an editable entity. A small mode chip in the header — rich (accent color) or simple (muted) — shows which mode is active for the current entity.

Editor modes

Rich mode

Used by: Text (MTEXT labels) and Multileader annotations.

Feature	Behaviour
Bold / Italic / Strikethrough	Per-character (apply to selection, or whole entity if no selection)
Font and Height	Per-character override, or whole-entity default
`Enter`	Inserts a hard line break
`Shift+←/→`	Extends or shrinks a text selection
`Home` / `End`	Jump to start / end of the current hard line
Word wrap	Supported via reference-width resize grips

Simple mode

Used by: Dimension Linear, Dimension Aligned, Dimension Angular, Dimension Radius, Dimension Diameter.

The editor is pre-seeded with the current dimension’s rendered label so you can position the cursor and edit the value directly.

Feature	Behaviour
Bold / Italic / Font / Height	Available — applies to the entire label at once
Per-character formatting	Not supported
`Enter`	Commits the value and closes the editor (no line break)
Multi-line	Not supported
Word wrap	Not supported

Opening the editor

Action	Result
`text` command → click position	Creates a new text entity and opens the editor (rich)
Double-click an existing Text entity	Re-opens the editor in rich mode
Double-click an existing Multileader	Opens the editor in rich mode
Double-click a dimension entity	Opens the editor in simple mode
`Escape` inside the editor	Closes the editor and keeps all changes

The toolbar floats above the text’s bounding box and stays anchored to the entity as you pan or zoom.

Bold · Italic · Strikethrough

Button	Shortcut	What it does
B	—	Toggle bold
I	—	Toggle italic
S	—	Toggle strikethrough

How toggling applies:

With a text selection — the style is applied to exactly the selected characters only.
No selection, cursor in existing text — toggles the style on the whole entity (all segments).
Empty text or new entity — the style is stored on the empty segment and applied to every character you type from that point on.

The button appears highlighted (active) when every character in the current selection — or the character immediately to the left of the cursor — has that style set.

Font

The dropdown groups available typefaces into Default (the built-in sans-serif), User (your own uploaded fonts, if any), Free (a set of bundled Google Fonts), and System (common OS fonts such as Helvetica, Times New Roman, Georgia, Courier New, Verdana, Tahoma, Trebuchet MS, Lucida Console, and Impact).

With a selection — overrides the font for selected characters only.
No selection — applies the font to the whole entity.

The dropdown reflects the font of the character left of the cursor when there is no selection.

Not limited to the built-in list — click the Font Manager button in the toolbar to upload your own .ttf file and add it to the User group. See Font Manager for details.

Height

The number field sets the cap height (height of a capital letter) in drawing units.

With a selection — overrides the height for selected characters, independently of the entity’s base height.
No selection — changes the entity’s base height (applies to all characters that do not have an individual height override).

The field reflects the height of the character left of the cursor. Leave it blank to use the entity default.

Key	Action
`←` / `→`	Move caret one character left or right
`Home`	Jump to the start of the current hard line
`End`	Jump to the end of the current hard line
`Shift` + `←` / `→`	Extend or shrink the selection
`Backspace`	Delete the character to the left (or the selection)
`Delete`	Delete the character to the right (or the selection)
`Enter`	Insert a line break
`Escape`	Close the editor

The cursor height automatically matches the cap height of the adjacent character, including the smaller size used for subscript and superscript.

Copy, cut, and paste

Key	Action
`Ctrl+C` / `Cmd+C`	Copy the selected text
`Ctrl+X` / `Cmd+X`	Cut the selected text
`Ctrl+V` / `Cmd+V`	Paste at the cursor

Copy and cut require an active text selection. Pasted text is always plain — it takes on the formatting (bold, italic, font, height) already at the cursor rather than carrying over the formatting it had when copied.

In rich mode, line breaks in the pasted text are preserved. In simple mode, line breaks are stripped, since dimension labels are single-line.

Word wrap

When a text entity has a reference width set, long lines are soft-wrapped at word boundaries to fit within that width.

To set or change the reference width while the entity is selected, drag the resize grips — the thin rectangles on the left and right edges of the dashed bounding box. The content reflows in real time as you drag.

Setting the reference width to zero (drag the grips together or delete the value in the properties panel) removes word wrap and lets lines grow freely.

Multi-line text

Press Enter to insert a hard line break. Each hard line is independent — Home and End navigate within the current hard line only.

Hard line breaks and per-character formatting are stored using the MTEXT format and survive a full DXF round-trip.

DXF compatibility

Text entities are stored as MTEXT in DXF files. Bold and italic are encoded as \L, \K, \O, and inline font switches (\f). Per-character height is encoded as \H. All formatting is preserved on export and readable by LibreCAD, FreeCAD, and other DXF-compatible applications.