Lesson 2 - Customizing the Appearance of Text on Twine

The following video demonstrates each of the steps outlined below in text.

Text Styles

To apply some text styles to your text…

• Highlight the text you’d like to apply the styling to.
• Open up the Styles menu.
• Select the styling you’d like.
  

If all went according to plan, your text should be formatted similarly to the style itself. It should also be surrounded by a symbol at the start and end. Those signify the text style, similarly to how square brackets [[ ]] signify a link, so they won’t be seen in the game itself.

Additional Text Styles

If bold, italic, strikethrough, and superscript aren’t enough, there’s an extra menu with a lot more options.

• Highlight the text you’d like to apply the styling to.
• Open up the Styles menu.
• Click on More Styles .
  
• Create the text style you’d like and click Add .
  

You can scroll down to see more options for the text styles.

There’s lots of customization available in this menu, allowing for font variants, underlines, strikes, superscripts, subscripts, outlines, letter spacing, flips, stretches, and animations.

Colours

If you’d like to change the font colour or the colour of the text background…

• Highlight the text you’d like to apply the colouring to.
• Open up the Colours menu.
• Select the styling you’d like.

There’s a lot of customization here too, allowing for gradients and custom colour selection. Take some time to play around with these settings!

Check out Geoffrey’s novel here!

Borders

Twine also allows you to add borders to text.

• Highlight the text you’d like to apply the border to.
• Open up the Borders menu.
• Select the styling you’d like.

Being able to modify each side of the border allows for some interesting possibilities.

Rotated Text

You can also rotate text!

• Highlight the text you’d like to apply the rotation to.
• Open up the Rotate text menu.
• Select the styling you’d like.

Rotating text may seem a little niche, but there’s some really cool effects you can do with it.

Lists

Bulleted and numbered lists are another thing you can make.

• Highlight the text you’d like to make a list item.
• Open up the List and line items menu.
• Select the list type you’d like.

Alignment and Columns

Finally, the last text formatting option we’ll cover is alignment and columns.

Alignment

• Highlight the text you’d like to change the alignment of.
• Open up the Alignments and columns menu and select Alignment .
• Adjust the placement and width of your text and select the text alignment.

Columns

• Do not highlight any text. Select an empty area.
• Open up the Alignments and columns menu and select Columns .
• Adjust the number of columns and cell sizes.
• Move your text into the designated text area created for you.

Twine allows for in-depth positioning and column editing that’s rarely found in other applications.

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Key Points / Summary

• There are many ways to customize text in Twine.

Brought to you by the Lewis & Ruth Sherman Centre for Digital Scholarship and the McMaster University Library.
Module content created by Veronica Litt; edited for online use and online pages created by Veronica Litt and Richie Motorgeanu.
This workshop is part of the Do More with Digital Scholarship (DMDS) series.
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