The Character and Paragraph panel in Paint by Zaweba

Good typography is mostly small decisions made well. The Character and Paragraph panel in Paint by Zaweba gathers those decisions in one place, from the obvious ones like font and size to the details that separate a home-made flyer from a professional one, such as proper small caps, old-style figures and sensible hyphenation.

Text in Paint is shaped with HarfBuzz, the open-source shaping engine used widely in browsers and design software, so OpenType features in your fonts are read properly rather than faked.

The character side

The basics are font, weight, size, leading, tracking and kerning. Beyond those, width and height scale stretch letters horizontally or vertically. Use them sparingly; a font family's own condensed or wide styles almost always look better than a squashed regular.

Baseline shift raises or lowers selected characters without changing the line. It is the tool for nudging a trademark-style symbol, a degree sign or a bullet character into position, or for setting a playful bouncing word.

Colour, all caps, small caps, superscript, subscript, underline and strikethrough are all here, along with faux bold and faux italic for fonts that lack those styles. Anti-aliasing controls how letter edges blend into the background, which matters most for small text on screen graphics.

OpenType features

Many fonts carry extra glyphs that only appear when you ask for them. The panel lets you switch on ligatures, so pairs like fi and fl join neatly. Alternates swap in different versions of a letter. Fractions turn typed numbers like 1/2 into a proper fraction, and ordinals set the small raised letters in 1st and 2nd. Swashes add decorative tails, which suit wedding invitations and shop signs.

Figures deserve their own mention. Lining figures sit at capital height and suit headlines and tables. Old-style figures rise and fall like lower-case letters and look natural in running text. Tabular figures all share one width, so columns of prices or times line up. Stylistic sets switch on groups of alternate designs a font maker has bundled. Whether any of these do something depends on the font; if a setting seems to have no effect, the font simply does not include it.

The paragraph side

Paragraph options cover alignment, indents, and space before and after. Space between paragraphs usually reads better than a blank line, because you can make it smaller and more consistent.

Hyphenation is set up for UK English, which helps justified text avoid big gaps between words. Composers decide how lines are broken. A composer that looks at the whole paragraph tends to give more even spacing than one that works a line at a time, and it is worth trying both on any justified block.

Typography habits worth keeping

Set small caps from the panel rather than typing capitals at a smaller size. Real small caps have matched stroke weight, while shrunken capitals look thin beside the rest of the text.

For price lists, menus and timetables, switch on tabular lining figures so the numbers stack. For a paragraph of story text in an invitation or a poster, old-style figures and ligatures give a more bookish feel.

Use faux bold and italic only as a last resort. If the font family has a true bold, use that.

Where the panel fits

The panel works with the Text tool and with the Type Styles panel, which lets you save a set of these choices and apply them again. Build a heading style once with exactly the tracking, figures and spacing you like, and every later poster in Paint by Zaweba can share it.