App for iPad to convert a little bit of text to an image?

September 14, 2022 9:10 AM

I’m drawing pictures in the Paper (by WeTransfer) app (which I love) on my iPad Pro. But sometimes I like to type text and put it into one of my drawings.

The way I’ve been doing this so far is: I type the text on my PC, e.g. in Open Office. Then I take a screenshot of it and put it into paint.net. Then I save it as a .jpg. Then I mail it to myself and get on my iPad and save the picture into my camera roll. Then I go into Paper and hit the Photos tool and there it is, to import into my drawing.

I can continue to do this for the rest of my life, but I wonder how I might be able to do all of it on the iPad, that is, type something, save it as an image, and get it into the Camera Roll.

So far I’ve tried Zoom notes, but I have so much trouble with text boxes in apps like that. In this particular example, I need to type the text so that it fits into a circle, which will become a dialogue bubble for a character that’s speaking. I just can’t get the text to do that, with all its border/dots etc. which make formatting text so damned difficult. But even with a trial run to just export the text as a .jpg to my email address, the email was empty — obviously I didn’t do the attachment correctly.

Any suggestions for an app that will simplify this task on an iPad? Thanks!

posted by DMelanogaster to Computers & Internet (5 answers total)

I don't understand your formatting constraints (" I just can’t get the text to do that, with all its border/dots etc"), but given the rest of what you've described, this is what I would do on the iPad. It does not involve adding any new apps.

1. Go into the Notes app on the iPad. Type the text I want in the format I want.
2. Take a screen shot.
3. Tap the thumbnail of the screen shot so I can edit it.
4. Crop the screen shot down to just the text I want.
5. Tap the share icon (the little box with an arrow coming out of it.
6. Tap "Copy"
7. Go into Paper and paste.

Does that do what you want?
posted by Winnie the Proust at 9:39 AM on September 14, 2022 [1 favorite]

The Pages app that comes with your iPad will let you put text in a shape. You can then take a screenshot, crop it as desired and save it to the camera roll. I don’t have the Paper app, but I assume you should be able to paste it in from the camera roll.
posted by doctord at 9:40 AM on September 14, 2022

If you use Keynote (Apple's version of PowerPoint) you can also do fancy text and text box formatting and then export the slide to your Ipad as a jpeg (or whatever) format image and skip the screenshotting step. They you can import that file into Paper.
posted by sevenless at 9:48 AM on September 14, 2022

Response by poster: DONE with Notes! thanks!
posted by DMelanogaster at 10:39 AM on September 14, 2022 [1 favorite]

FWIW, Tayasui Sketches (similar to Paper) has a text tool built in. You have to use the built-in fonts, though.
posted by Thorzdad at 11:13 AM on September 14, 2022 [1 favorite]