Sketch tips — Work out the real distance of text to shape edges

Luis Ouriach
Prototypr
Published in
2 min readSep 20, 2017

We’ve all been there — creating our pixel perfect designs, only to come stuck when trying to vertically set type.

Sketch’s approach to bounding boxes with type includes the line height, even if it’s just one line of text. This causes headaches, because we can’t see how far the text is actually away from the shape edge.

Who is that box and what does he do?

For me, this has meant manually nudging the text to the edge of the box we’re trying to set it to, then starting from there to work out the perfect pixel margins.

CTRL to the rescue

Okay, prepare yourself.

Holding CTRL whilst holding ALT will not only show you the distance to the edge of the object, but will remove the bounding box / line height of the text.

Who knew that one keyboard key could cause so much joy?

Spread the word, folks.

Enjoy this post? I run a weekly newsletter, Milk, No Sugar, where I’m trying to remove small talk one newsletter at a time. I share great articles, videos and galleries every week, from the eye of a designer.

Free

Distraction-free reading. No ads.

Organize your knowledge with lists and highlights.

Tell your story. Find your audience.

Membership

Read member-only stories

Support writers you read most

Earn money for your writing

Listen to audio narrations

Read offline with the Medium app

Published in Prototypr

Prototyping, UX Design, Front-end Development and Beyond 👾 | ✍️ Write for us https://bit.ly/apply-prototypr

Written by Luis Ouriach

Design and community @FigmaDesign, newsletter writer, co-host @thenoisepod, creator of @8pxmag. Sarcastic.

Responses (9)

Write a response

Holding CTRL whilst holding ALT

*Mind blown*
Thank you so much. Really helpful tip!

I would rephrase the sentence, Holding CTRL whilst holding ALT:
While holding Alt down, then press Ctrl.

Ask and ye shall receive!
Author, thank you kindly for offering to help! But today I found this on my companies slack channel: https://github.com/andyault/sketch-adjusttofit