Hello everyone, this tutorial is aimed to give you an in depth understanding of clip studio’s text tool. 

Sure, it’s just a text tool, you click somewhere, draw a box and type in the box. But this tool has so many options, and knowing them can definitely save you huge amounts of time if you are for example drawing a 200-page manga like I am right now.

I will go over every option that I found relevant for my use.

First before diving into the options tab of the text tool, like all other tools we have this little lock up here which I find is crucial on this tool. When locked, every time you change to another tool and go back to selecting the text tool, it will give you the settings that were in pace when you locked them. This is very useful if you want to have a standard font and size for a whole book, and only sometimes change the font for specific sound effects or speech.

---

In the first tab, we have the option to either have the tool always create a new text on the click, or edit the currently selected text, just as if you had the operation tool. I prefer this option as it lets you edit a previous text in your page just by clicking on it, you can also click outside a text to add a new text box.

Then on the second tab you can configure the click and drag.

You have three options, first is having it create a text box, which I find is the better option,

next, you can have it act as a selection tool to select multiple text boxes in the page, without having to select them manually in the layers tab. And lastly, you can disable it if you don’t use it and don’t want it to accidentally happen.

The next line you can have is if you want your click to select a new text, which is the more natural mode I think, or add all the texts to the selection as you click on them.

On the third tab, I recommend using the detect position as the more natural option, but sometimes, the option to add to chosen text could be useful. If you already have a text layer selected, and click somewhere outside of that box, it will add a new textbox but still on the same text layer. This is not my preferred workflow, I’d rather have each speech bubble or text in different layers, but now you know this option exists.

The fourth tab is all the font options, you can select your font, and have all the spacing options you need, as well as forcing, bold or italic. You can also choose the color. Remember, the little eye icon next to any option line means this option will be visible in property tools panel. One hidden option is the ability to create font lists:

You have to click on the font, and at the bottom you’ll see a window with all your font lists, by default you will have only one with every font. If you now click on the cogwheel, you open a new window where you can create a list and select which fonts should appear in it. Once you’re done click okay, and now in your text tool this list will be available, and it’s a really nice option to sort out what fonts you use regularly for specific projects. 

The next tab is pretty self-explanatory, you have your line spacing, and your text justification.

The next tab is also more alignment and direction options for the whole text. Again, these are simple, and can be left by default, but you should copy and paste a big text and try the options to see if maybe some could be useful for you. They never have been in all the usecases I had.

Next tab can be ignored because it will be greyed out unless you use ruby, which is a programming language, this is a whole other topic though.

The text lists tab can act as the character table for windows, it seems, but I also never used it because I never had the need for specific characters.

And finally with have this last relevant tab which is all you parameters fro transformation of the text. These are the same parameters you would find in the basic operation tool, but here you can set different defaults if you want. For example, by default the transformation mode would be scale and rotation, but you can choose either one, or even have incline added to the mix.

We also have a secret tab that appears only if you don’t have a text layer selected, and this gives you the choice of the default color of you text. You can choose to default to primary or secondary color, or also choose a specific color entirely and be independent of your painting colors. I personally choose black as the default color for all my text because this is by far the most common to be used, and then change the text color only when needed on a specific layer.