Question: Is there an option to simultaneously change the text values for multiple text objects?

Background: I loose a lot of time during projects trying out different font styles. I ended up making a Inkscape doc containing a text object for each font style. The thought was I could update all the values en masse to see how my text blocks look in different fonts.

I run into my problem when updating all the objects. How can I change the text values for all the objects at once? Thanks!

Welcome to InkscapeForum!

What do you mean by "text values"? Are you talking about using XML? If it's on the canvas, you can simply select all the text at once, then make the changes. But it sounds like you're probably talking about XML, or maybe some kind of script?

Perhaps it`s all about font size, spacing among lines or letters... and the rest from toolbar (except for Horizontal kerning, Vertical shift and Character rotation. In order to apply these changes, text has to be selected as an text but not as an object). If so, and if possible, move all text to the separate layer. That way you`ll make selecting of the text much easier and changes in values will be applied to all selected.

By "Text Values" I'm referring to actual text.

For example lets say I have 3 text objects with place holder "Hello World" text written in them. One is in Times New Roman another in Garamond & the last Arial. I want to change all of them to say "Come over to Jone's Big Truck Rental & Storage..." but retain the original font styles.

Any way to do this so I can see how the new text looks in all the different fonts? Thanks!

Using clones would be cool. Simply edit the original's text and all the clones will update their appearance (read: their text) as well. This works... the problem though is that (if memory serves) you can't give clones different font attributes from what their parent objects have, rendering this attempt mostly useless.

One way to do what you're trying to do is to open the file in a text editor and replace the old text string (replace ALL of them) with whatever new text you want. Save the edited file and reload it in Inkscape. No need to close Inkscape while you're tinkering in the editor. Simply use the File->revert command after you've changed the file in the text editor. I admit that this isn't very elegant (for some reason most of my suggestions tend to be like this :D) but it's relatively quick and unless somebody comes up with a better idea this should work.

It works! Thanks Dillerkind!

i'm probably sticking my neck out a bit...but i think that svg itself would allow you to encapsulate a tspan or whatever object in a group and reference it from several places, and apply different styles to those references. as to actually getting this going i can't help further with actual code, as it would take a bit of time to tinker. then there's still the question of whether Inkscape would properly render this and allow required interaction.
Another way of going about this is to have some reasonably sized blocks of placeholder text (lorem ipsum) in each font, which should allow you to roughly judge how appropriate any block looks to you; without using actual text. With any luck you should be able to change line spacing of all the block samples at the same time, without affecting font. But it probably won't allow you to change font size en masse without affecting font face also. there's some good typography rules of thumb to start with when working with text, that will save you time.
If Inkscape supported defining your own styles, that would be supreme.

Resurrecting an old thread because I have the same issue, however I cannot use a text editor to replace/all text.

I'm making study material for Japanese class, and on every page there are 10 Japanese characters (kanji) to practice, and each character is shown small, large and in two different fonts.

I migrated from M$ Visio, where I could just select the objects, press paste, and the text inside all objects would be replaced.

I need this because I'm making a lot of these sheets, and I do this by duplicating a sheet and then copy/pasting the characters from a text editor into the design, 10 times.

Zom-B wrote:Resurrecting an old thread because I have the same issue, however I cannot use a text editor to replace/all text.

>Why so? Maybe your text editor (Notepad?) doesn't support Kanji characters, but there are (free) others that do (Notepad++, for Windows, AFAIK: http://notepad-plus-plus.org/). The rest is a matter of cut and paste.