Step 1: open Paint and open the image you want to add text to.
Step 2: click the "Text" tool button on the ribbon (keyboard shortcut: T). This will toggle the button on, indicating that the text tool is active.
Step 3: with the text tool active, click on the image where you want to type text. A resizable rectangle will appear where you can type the text. A floating toolbar will appear as well where you change the text formatting. You can start typing the text right away.
Step 4. after you're finished, click File -> Save as -> PNG picture on the menubar to save the image.
- How to Save a File.
- How to Decide which Image File Format (PNG, JPG, BMP) to Use.
- Danger: Your Image Files may be Destroyed by Default.
Video
Advanced Editing
Input Area
The rectangle that appears when you click with the text tool on an image is your input area. It has some important features.
Automatic line-wrapping: the text will automatically wrap when it fills a line in the rectangular area. You need to drag the handles at the corners and sides to make the area larger if you don't want it to wrap.
Clipping: the text won't render beyond the area of the rectangle. This means if the rectangle can only fit 3 lines in it, but you typed 5 lines, 2 lines will be "outside" and will become invisible. Normally, this isn't possible because the rectangle automatically increases in height as you type. However, if you manually make the rectangle smaller later, the text you typed may disappear (and a scrollbar will appear).
This notion exists in many image-editing programs, but not all programs do the automatic increase in height OR display a scrollbar or other indicator that the text is clipped. Notably, both of these features are missing from GIMP.
Text-alignment anchor: the area of the rectangle is used when changing the text alignment from left-aligned to center or right-aligned. It's possible to move the text around by clicking and dragging the rectangular area around.
Text cursor: as expected from an application made by Microsoft itself, all fundamental text editing functions work in this input area. You can move the text cursor around with arrow keys; the Ctrl+Arrow Key shortcuts work; holding Shift and moving the cursor or clicking on a character selects the text; Home and End keys work; it's possible to cut, copy, and paste text with Ctrl+X, Ctrl+C, and Ctrl+V; and you can type text using an IME.
Rasterization
The text you type into the input area is editable only temporarily. If you click away from the input area, Paint applies the text, burning permanently onto the pixels of the image below. Once this happens, it's no longer possible to select the text or edit it.
This is common in simple raster image editors, and the main reason why you should avoid software like Paint to add lots of text to images. I recommend using Inkscape or another vector-based image-editor if you are doing that, because then you can always edit the text without being worried it's going to disappear one day. Some advanced raster image editors like GIMP and Krita also have editable text, but these applications in particular aren't very good at handling text.
When the text is applied, you also lose the pixels that were under the text. For example, if you accidentally apply green text over someone's face, the previously skin-colored pixels are now green. If you tried to move the text away now, it would just move everything away and leave a blank hole in place. Your only option is to undo (Ctrl+Z), but then you will have to type the text again.
Recent versions of Microsoft Paint have layers, which can help alleviate this problem.
Inline Text Formatting
In Paint, when doing things like changing the font, the text size, the text color, or making the text bold, italic, underlined, or strikethrough, these changes don't apply to the whole text, but parts of the text, which can be very frustrating.
For example, if you type something, then change the font, or text size, click the bold button, or change the color, THE TEXT WON'T CHANGE.
These settings do not apply to the text you just typed, they only apply to the text you'll type after you changed the settings.
In order to change the settings for the text you already typed, you need to first select the text you already typed, and then change the text properties.
Changing the Font
To change the text font, click the leftmost dropdown in the floating text toolbar. A list of all fonts installed in your operating system will appear. It's in alphabetical order, the name of each font is rendered using the font itself. You'll need to scroll through this list until you find the font you want.
Observation: normally, you are able to type the name of a font in a widget like this because it's a combo box, but in this case, it's a list and that seems to come with some issues. If you press a letter while a list has keyboard focus, the selection jumps to the first item that starts with that letter, so you could type the name of the font in this widget. However, Paint has several tools with keyboard shortcuts that are letters, e.g. T is for the text tool, E for the eraser, etc. If you press E while the dropdown is active, Paint will switch to the eraser tool, and then because the text tool is no longer active, Paint will rasterize the text.
Changing the Text Size
To change the size of the text, click on the second dropdown in the text toolbar.
The numbers represent the size of the font in pixels. It's worth noting that fonts are free to make their characters whatever size they want, which means that a font with 20 pixels of size really means characters have "up to" 20 pixels in height.
Paint's text size dropdown goes from 5 to 72 pixels. To make the text size smaller than 5, or larger than 72, you will have to type the number instead of clicking on it.
Making the text Bold, Italic, Underlined, or Strikethrough
To make the text bold, italic, underlined, or strikethrough, just click on the buttons B, I, U, and S on the toolbar after you have selected a portion of the text that you want to format. You can also activate some of these with keyboard shortcuts: Ctrl+B, Ctrl+I, and Ctrl+U.
Note: Ctrl+S is the keyboard shortcut for saving the file.
Changing Text Color and Background Color
To change the text color in Microsoft Paint, you need to click on the color palette in the ribbon while the text tool is active. The background color is changed similarly. The text color is also called the foreground color.
The palette in the ribbon is used to set the foreground and background color in the program. Which of the two is set depends on which of the two is active. If you click on the foreground color, then on the palette, it changes the color of the foreground color. If you click the background color, then the palette, it changes the background color.
Alternatively, if you right-click on the palette, it sets the other color. If foreground is selected and you right click, it sets the background color. And if background is selected and you right click, it sets the foreground color.
If the color you want isn't in the palette, click on the rainbow-colored circular button at the right to open the advanced color selector dialog.
Observation: you can't right click the advanced color selector button the way you can with the palette colors.
A single text area may have multiple foreground colors, but only one background color.
The background color will fill the entire text area, as a single rectangle. It can be toggled by a checkbox that reads "Background fill" in the toolbar. You need to check "Background fill" in order for the background color to appear at all. When unchecked, changing the background color does nothing as it will always be transparent.
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