Text and fonts

Text in Zenom is vector text: glyphs become outlines of the chosen font, and every letter is hatched as an independent island with its own holes (o, e, a) — the same behavior as EzCad.

Text parameters

  • Height is set in millimeters (0.1–500 mm) — like everything on the canvas.
  • Character spacing and line spacing — in percent; clicking the parameter icon resets and restores the value.
  • Line alignment: left, center, right, justify.
  • Bold (Ctrl+B), italic, vertical text (characters top to bottom), rotation of the whole block.
  • Resizing with handles changes the axis scale, not the font size: height in mm = font height × scale, so the text never drifts while you edit it.

Fonts and the Font Manager

  • TTF/OTF fonts are supported: system fonts plus custom folders (Font Manager → Add Font Folder; files are not locked on disk).
  • Fonts are grouped by typographic family with styles (Light, SemiBold, Condensed…); custom families split across separate Regular/Bold/Italic files collapse into a single entry.
  • Favorites, recent, named collections, filters by category (Serif / Sans / Mono / Script / Decorative) and by language — from Latin and Cyrillic to CJK.

Touch Type — editing individual letters

Touch Type mode lets you select a single character and move, scale, or rotate it independently of the rest of the text. The reset button clears (and restores again) all per-glyph transforms; when the text is edited, the transforms are remapped onto the surviving characters. Touch Type also works on text on a path.

Text on a path

Text can follow a guide curve — click a path with the Text tool or create a text-on-path object:

  • Circle — text on a circle: radius, start angle, direction (clockwise or counterclockwise).
  • FreePath — text along an arbitrary Bézier curve; the guide’s nodes are editable and the curve can be closed.

Shared placement parameters: offset along the path, offset along the normal, the Inside / Outside side, vertical glyph placement (Top / Center / Bottom), and “Keep glyphs upright (stair step)” — letters follow the path without rotating, like Stair Step in Illustrator.

Breaking text into characters

The Ungroup (Ctrl+U) command on text works like Break Apart in Corel: the text splits into individual editable per-character text objects — kerning, alignment, and Touch Type transforms are preserved exactly, the letters do not shift. With text on a path, each character receives the tangent rotation at its point on the path. Variable text is frozen at its current value when split.

Limitations

  • No single-line/stroke fonts (SHX, single-line engraving fonts) — text is built from TTF/OTF only. For thin inscriptions use a narrow outline font and mark the contour without a fill.
  • No separate user kerning: with character spacing at zero, the font’s native kerning applies.
  • The Circle mode guide is a circle only; an ellipse is drawn as a FreePath curve.
  • Justify along a path does not stretch the text to the guide’s full length.