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Text Styles

A text style is a named preset for text objects — it bundles font family, bold/italic, default height, colour, and line spacing under a name like “Road Names” or “Lot Numbers”, as traditional CAD does. Styles are stored in the document and save/load with templates, so an office standard set travels with your drawings.

Every new document starts with two styles matching the built-in fonts:

  • Standard — Inter
  • Monospace — the bundled Roboto Mono

Applying a style stamps its properties onto the text object at that moment. Text objects keep no reference back to the style, so:

  • Editing a style later does not restyle existing text.
  • Deleting a style leaves existing text exactly as it is.

To restyle existing text, re-apply the (edited) style to it.

Managing styles

Open the manager from View -> Text Styles. Each style is a row you can edit in place:

  • Name — what appears in the font dropdown.
  • Font — Inter and Monospace first, then every font installed on the machine (see Fonts below).
  • B / I — bold and italic toggles.
  • Height — the default text height, in world units (metres for a survey drawing) — unlike line type patterns, which are paper millimetres.
  • Color — full ACI palette or a custom RGB value.
  • Spacing — line spacing multiplier for multi-line text (0.5–3.0, 1.0 = normal).

Create a style by typing a name at the top and clicking Create (it starts as Inter with default properties); delete one with ✕.

Applying a style

Double-click a text object (or create one with the Text tool) to enter text editing. The font dropdown in the text-edit toolbar lists the document’s styles at the top — each with a summary of its font, weight, and height — followed by the raw font families. Picking a style stamps all of its properties onto the text, including the height; picking a bare font family changes only the font.

Fonts

Font families come from three sources, scanned once at launch:

  1. Bundled — Inter and Roboto Mono ship inside NullCad and render identically on every machine.
  2. User fonts — any font file placed in the fonts folder of NullCad’s configuration directory:
    • Linux: ~/.config/nullcad/fonts
    • Windows: %APPDATA%\nullcad\fonts
  3. System fonts — everything installed on the machine.

Fonts installed while NullCad is running are picked up on the next launch.

If a document asks for a font that isn’t available on the current machine, the text renders in a fallback font rather than disappearing. For drawings that move between machines, prefer the bundled families or install the same fonts (e.g. via the user fonts folder) everywhere the drawing is opened.