Text:Simple Padding

I’ve been using Shotcut for a while now, creating content for my YouTube channel. The Text: Simple filter is probably one of the most heavily used filters in my content, but it does have what I feel is an incorrectly implemented feature, text padding.

I have certain “standards” that I adhere to in my content, one of which being the font and colour of my text. As my choice of colour is a light colour, to ensure my text is easily read regardless of the background imagery, I always like to select black padding for my text. But, I feel that the padding that Shotcut creates is created in the wrong direction. It always pads inwards rather than outwards.

To explain:

In my image above, which I’ve created in GIMP for the purpose of this explanation, the top is the original text without any padding, the lower-left is how Shotcut implements padding, whilst the lower-right is how I would prefer Shotcut to implement the padding. Basically, make it grow outward rather than inward.

The current method makes my text look duller as the padding gets thicker, making it harder to read if the text is too small. My current workaround is to create my text in GIMP and import it into Shotcut as an image.

It would be great if Shotcut could be tweaked so that I could have the padding grow outward if I choose to do so, either with a tickbox or with a negative value in the thickness box. Either would be great.

It is confusing to keep writing “padding” when I think you are really talking about outline. Do you use the English version of the UI? It has both Outline and Padding.

Shotcut uses Qt to render the text, and the “outline” is actually a stroke, which means it grows inward as well as outward because it centers the pen along the line. The usage of Qt and the behavior of Qt is very unlikely to ever change. However, the next version adds a new Outline video filter that works like you want (i.e. grows).

1 Like

Hi, I do apologise, yes, I am referring to the outline feature not padding. My bad!

Hopefully, the new filter that you mention will behave as I want and save me a lot of aggravation in the future. Do you have any idea when this new filter will be available?

1 Like