How can I write WORDS or TEXT in the animation

Installing Pencil2D / How to
1

I wish to write text as part of the animation.

Wish to avoid loading images for text or a set of words,

Is there a text writing tool ??

2

@icm63 There is no Text tool.
I use GIMP to make the texts I want. It is fairly easy to make a text on transparent background, and import it in Penci2D.
Why do you want to avoid importing images?
A Text tool is feature that might be implemented once in the future, but it is not in high priority.

3

I can use animation as an education tool, explaining a process, therefore add a text tool helps tell the story

please add a text tool

1 Like
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@icm63 Hi. This has been requested in the past and it’s on the project’s bucket list of features to add, however due to the open nature of the project itself we can’t force the developers to add anything they don’t want to work on at any given time.

We all agree however that having a text tool would be nice, but for now fixing critical bugs has taken the majority of the development time so until those are fixed we’ll have to wait for more features.

That said, we can’t really say when a text tool might become available in Pencil2D, so we hope you find a suitable alternative meanwhile we work to implement it.

Just in case if you’re interested in other open source tools to help you make presentations or animation for education purposes you could try and combine Pencil2D with Synfig (http://synfig.org) which has a text tool and uses vector drawings but permits to import and export bitmap images as well.

So for example a simple use case would be to use Synfig to create a text animation via auto-tweening and then export a sequence of PNG images with a transparent background back into Pencil2D to paint over with decorative hand-drawn effects.

There are other possibilities as well since Synfig has effects layers that can help embellish your animation work such as blurs, glows and other kinds of filters that can be applied to motion pictures. Cheers :slight_smile:

5

Adding a text tool makes it so easy to do a children story book with animation and a text story line

Make the effort, add a text tool

6

I find the comment ‘Make the effort’ insulting…

1 Like
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You should watch this

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@icm63 Will all due respect, let’s keep politics out of this forum, no matter if the video was used as a reactionary statement or simply to make fun out of the people replying on this thread (which I find uncalled for and in bad taste), this is not a child’s playground but a technical user support forum.

You proposed an idea and we informed you that it had been previously requested and it was already part of our roadmap, we even provided you with an alternative (and there are others for sure), so In case it wasn’t clear before, the text tool will come eventually but it’s poor practice to ask people to just “Wait For It™”

From a professional perspective using another program to get the best result possible so your business idea can prosper seems like the way to go in this case, and as a bonus you won’t need politically charged reaction videos to get your point across.

1 Like
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great will wait for a notification

Let us not be tooooo sensitive . We are all grown ups!

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@icm63 As @JoseMoreno already explained to you, the text tool is not our top priority. While I’m sure you think that it’s the feature you’d like to see the most, you would very quickly change your mind if the program crashed and you lost all of your work, or if a bug meant that you couldn’t use your tablet with Pencil2D. Our resources are limited so we must prioritize what we believe is most important to the users.

Moreover, it is not simply a matter of “making an effort”. @JoseMoreno, @davidlamhauge, myself, and all the other members of the Pencil2D Team make an effort all the time to improve this software, culminating in thousands of hours spent working on everything from fixing bugs and implementing new features, to maintaining the website and helping people with their issues. All of this work is done voluntarily for free so that we can provide you with the software for free. Your comment comes across as very dismissive of the large amount of effort that goes into maintaining and improving a project like this, which is why it is insulting to us.

I am glad that you want to make educational tools and children’s story books, and I am glad that you are interested in using Pencil2D. I’m even glad that you want to suggest features for us because we want to know what our users want. But trivializing our work, and then making such a passive-aggressive response with completely irrelevant political messages and accusing us of being too sensitive and not grown up is not the way to get what you want.

If you want text in your animations, then you make an effort: read the responses above and find a solution that works for you. Use another program or import text images from other programs. I assure you that you can create images from text in many other applications and import them into Pencil2D with far less effort than it would take for us to implement a full text tool. Don’t believe me? Then you put in the effort to implement it. We are an open source project which means anyone can add new features to the program. Our source code is located here: https://github.com/pencil2d/pencil/. Of course you will have to take the initiative to learn C++ and the Qt framework and familiarize yourself with the the tens to hundreds of thousands of lines of code that make up our code base all on your own; a process which each and every one of our developers had to go through before they could contribute anything major to Pencil2D. Then you will have to implement a text renderer, a text editor, a text layer/tool, and modify the save format, each of which is a lot of work on its own. Then you will have to extensively test all of your changes to make sure that they work correctly in all cases and that you haven’t unintentionally broken something else. Then members of the Pencil2D team will take the time to carefully review all of your work and will likely ask you to make some changes. After they are satisfied with the stability and quality of your work, it will be added to Pencil2D. Then you can finally use that text tool!

4 Likes
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When I animate in Pencil, I always have opened FireAlpaca (or PaintDotNET. Because I draw with mouse, not with tablet. FA and Paint.NET is the best toolls for mouse drawing! And when I need some new detail or text - i draw it in FA and export to the timeline (also, I always have opened the folder with my project).