pencil Text boxes (plain text and rich text) should be resizable

Operating system: Windows 8.1
Pencil version: 3 (latest)

For some reason, I found out that there's no way to resize either plain text boxes or rich text boxes. With regard to resizing, their default behavior is:

Rich text - initially resized to the length of the text, can only be resized later by encoding a newline (Shift + Enter)
Plain text - cannot be resized even if you try to enter a new line

It would be nice if the text boxes can at least be resized so that the text (under the given font size) will wrap its lines within the new bounds, and probably extend to a few more lines if the text exceeds whatever can fit inside the (resized) box.

Jul 20 '16 01:07 titopao

There is a "Fixed width" option in the context menu that does what you want (or at least for the sketchy UI collection).

Oct 17 '16 11:10 sanstream

In the version I'm using (3.0.4) the fixed width option does indeed resize the box to fit the text but you have no control of the choice of width. So, your only three options are a long single line with all of the text, using fixed width but having no control over that width and therefore height, or manually adding new lines for EVERY line at the "right" location to get the width I want (and having to redo all of the text again if I need to change the width).

Nearly every other tool of this nature does it the "normal" intuitive way. You can drag to resize the box and the text inside will re-flow to fit the box (with overflow being cut off if the box is too small).

To me this is a critical bug and makes the tool unusable for any serious mockup work.

Aug 04 '17 06:08 brennanfee

Toggling fixed width on should add a yellow handle you can drag left/right to change the width the text is fixed at.

Aug 04 '17 17:08 prikhi

@prikhi Nope, no yellow handle. Only handles to rotate the text.

Aug 07 '17 02:08 brennanfee

The Text element in the Common Shapes collection is being enhanced to address many issues including things described here. The following screenshot gives you a quick look on how it will be.

EDIT: One more thing to add is that we are going to deprecate the Plain Text element as it generates confusion. The pure SVG Rich Text element can serve well as a Plain Text element.