Make a custom text tool

First we'll select the text tool (T), and then navigate to the Create custom sub tool setting under the Sub tool menu.

Clicking on this will open a menu that allows us to pick a few initial settings for our sub tool. Pick a name for your tool—maybe the name of the comic that you're going to be using this style of lettering on. I'm choosing the name Strange Text because of a character named Steven Strange that I will introduce you to later on in the book. Next click on OK and we'll be taken to the Sub tool detail screen. Here we can set our font face, size, and if we want to, we can use bold or underline styles on the Font tab.

For this tool, I'm going to use Arial Black as the Font and set it to 12.0 points.

Clicking on the Text option to the left of this menu allows us to set Justification and Line spacing. Let's set our font tool to Center justification, so that our text lines for dialog will be centered to one another.

The Edit setting menu allows you to change the direction of the text from horizontal to vertical. It also has a setting for the display quality while editing text. If you find that, while working with text, you are clicking the corner handles a lot and accidentally resizing when you didn't want to, you can even turn off having the ability to resize text that way right in the Edit setting menu.

When you're done adjusting your text settings, you can just click on the cross in the upper right of the Sub tool detail screen. Your changes are automatically saved.

Now any time that we want to use text with this combination of settings, all we have to do is select the Strange Text custom tool from the Text sub tool menu. And the great thing is that we still have access to being able to change the text size, font, or style without having to change the tool settings too.

Now that you know the basics of making your own tools, go out there and experiment! The next section breaks down all the options available under the Sub tool detail menu, for easy reference while you're making your custom tools.