Adding text in a shape

Overview

Hey, everyone. In this tutorial, we're going to show you how to add text inside a shape very easily. So I’m going to come up here to the insert shape option in the toolbar and when I roll over shapes, you'll see 4 rows of shapes that pop out. The first row is squares and variations of squares and circles. The second row being hexagon and octagons. The third being triangular and parallelograms and then stars. So the only shapes you can add text inside of currently are actually any of the squares and the circular shapes.

So I'm gonna go ahead and click the square, drag it out, and I will also click this circle one and I'm holding down shift to get a perfect circle to grow. If I let go of the shift, it can skew to any side I like, so I'm just going to go ahead and click shift to keep it in a perfect circle. And now if I double click into the shape, you'll notice that a light text box appears and this is where I can add any text that I like. Same goes for the circle. 

Now if I add an entire paragraph, the circle will actually grow accordingly. So if that's necessary, that will happen. But for now, I'm just going to work with this square. So, of course, with this, I can resize and the text will not skew.

I can also change the radius of the border if I like. I'm going to keep it a square for now. Now, of course, like any shape, this still behaves like the other shapes would, so I can actually change the fill color to any color that I like. Unlike our pre-made icons, I can actually change the border color to any color. We do recommend using our color presets just because they're a really nice ratio of fill color to stroke color according to the darkness. It's a nice contrast. Okay, so that's the square text in shape. We actually have pre-filled shapes to save you even more time. If you roll all the way down, to the text shape option.

We actually have two rows here. One is just this perfect small circle with a single letter or number or the word text and then the second row actually has prefilled with either the word protein or label and that's exactly what it'll do.

So I can actually click this and it'll pre drag out a pill shaped protein shape. So you can imagine now if I'm clicking alt drag on a mac here, I can multiply this and start to create a pretty robust pathway if that's what I want to do. Of course, I could also group select and change the color of the text boxes if I like.

Now another use case for the text in shape feature is when you'd like to number, say, a lab protocol or an experiment like this, using numbers to lead your viewer's eye around the page is very helpful to the flow of information. So what I want to do is come up here to the insert shape feature again and come down to the text shape and select one of these preloaded single digit circles. I'm going to go ahead and use this number one here. So just click down and then click anywhere on the page. And what that did was it created a perfect circle with a number that's centered right into the middle. So what I can do is click command+c and command+v to copy and paste that and do the same thing 5 more times. And you can also alt-drag, which I'm doing here now. There are multiple ways to duplicate an object in BioRender. And all I have to do is double-click and of course, update the number accordingly.

So this one's going to be a “4”, a “5”, and you see that the perfect circle does remain, which is great. And of course, you can always align, if you like, coming up to the align tab, making sure that they're all evenly spaced.

And there you go. That's how I would use the insert shape text function to number an experiment like this. Now, you can start to create some pretty beautiful and complex figures just by using the text in shape function.

Of course, again, you can multi select and change colors using our preset color palette, and then easily edit the text by double clicking, and adding in text accordingly.

Great. So that's the text and shape function, and I hope you'll find it helpful.