Paint puts words on a picture with its Text tool. You drag out a box, type into it, and set the font and size in a small Fonts window that opens at the same time. Until you finish, the words sit in an editable box above the canvas, so you can still change the font, the colors and where the box sits. The steps below go from drawing the box to placing the finished text, along with what carries over to the picture and what doesn't.
Draw a text box with the Text tool
Paint only makes a text box when you drag one out. A plain click on the canvas with this tool doesn't create one.
- Click Text in the tool box. Hovering over it shows the tooltip Inserts text into the picture.
- Hold the mouse button down on the canvas, drag out a rectangle where the words should go, and let go.
- Start typing in the box that appears. Press Enter whenever you want to start a new line.
- Look for the small Fonts window that opens along with the box. If it would cover the box, Paint shifts it aside.
Choose the font and font size in the Fonts window
The Fonts window holds the settings for how the letters look: a dropdown for the font family, a field for the size, and four toggle buttons. Every new text box starts in Arial at size 12. Each change shows up in the box straight away. The View menu also lists a Text Toolbar item, but it is disabled here.
- Font family: open the dropdown and choose a font. The list is made up of the fonts your browser can detect on your device, so what you see depends on the computer you're using.
- Size: enter a number in the size field. It takes values from 8 up to 72.
- Style: the four icon buttons turn bold, italic, underline and vertical text on or off.
How the text color and background behind it work
The letters use the primary color, so to change it, left-click one of the colors in the color box at the bottom. For the fill behind opaque text, right-click a color there instead, which picks the secondary color. For the area behind the words, the options area gives two settings. You can change either color, or switch between the two settings, while the box is still open, and the box updates to match.
- Opaque fills the whole text box with that secondary color, so the words sit on a solid block of it.
- Transparent adds no background at all, and the picture underneath stays visible around the letters.
Place the text into the picture
While the box is open, the words float above the canvas and are not yet part of the image. Paint draws them in, which is called committing, as soon as you end the box in one of the ways listed below. The Fonts window closes together with the box. A box left empty adds nothing to the picture, and if a placed piece of text isn't what you wanted, Ctrl+Z takes it back out as a single undo step.
- Press somewhere else on the canvas to begin another text box.
- Pick a different tool in the tool box.
- Use another action that ends the box, such as Select All, File > New or opening a picture.
Check how the finished text will look
The placed text keeps most of what you set in the box, but not every style.
- The first line starts one pixel inside the box's top-left corner.
- Lines wrap when they reach the right side of the box. A single word that is wider than the box gets split onto more than one line.
- The gap from one line to the next is roughly 1.67 times the font size.
- The font family, size, bold and italic all carry over into the picture.
- Underline and vertical text only show in the editing box. Once the text is placed, those two styles are not drawn.
Move or resize the text box before you finish
Until the text is committed, you can still change where the box sits and how big it is.
- To move the box, press on its edge, outside the part where you type, and drag it to a new spot.
- To change its size, drag one of the handles around it.
- Hold Shift as you drag the box to leave copies of the text behind along the path it travels.
- The box is allowed to hang partly past the edges of the picture.
Use the keyboard and zoom while typing
When the cursor is inside the text box, Paint ignores its own keyboard shortcuts, so the normal editing keys work just as they would in any other text field. Zooming in or out changes how large the box and its lettering appear on screen, keeping them in step with the zoomed picture.