Please bear with this simple, stupid, basic question, which however has been plaguing me for two days. I cannot be considered a Photoshop expert, even if I have been used it for the past 25+ years; I'm just a regular, casual user. Also, I don't know any Photoshop-specific scripting (but I'm not afraid to tackle JavaScript), nor have I an array of latest-generation plugins/scripts/extensions which do all the magic for you.
With all the above in mind...
Here's something that I thought would be obvious to do in Photoshop: I'm writing some text inside balloons for a comic. Simple, right? All I need to do is to draw the balloon, making sure it's a closed path, and then click inside it with the text tool, and just type away. Easy!
Until, that is, you notice that you have written too much to fit into the balloon! Okay, I say, let's make the balloon larger, the text surely will flow into place, right?
Well...
Almost, but not quite.
Everybody knows how to draw the most insanely complex shape or path (or start with a brush and convert it to a shape/path) and then twiddle and tweak it, and — abracadabra! — the text magically flows across the most wild shapes possible, and you can edit it over and over again, and Photoshop will beautifully render every single letter with precision.
Right — but that's for those cases where the background is transparent. Which, to my surprise, is exactly what 100% of all tutorials/videos/how-tos/answers seem to assume. (There are a million ways of doing it wrong, and each one of those shows the many ways which will do it correctly.). Here is a typical example, from a professional comics creator (he's using Photoshop Elements, but it's the same thing in this case),
Apparently, nobody really cares what happens to the shape afterwards. If it's invisible... you can even just delete the original shape and just play around with the text's own shape instead. The original, in 100% of the cases I've found (let's assume that I read at least 50 different replies to similar questions), was expected to be "discarded" or at least "made irrelevant".
Alas, I cannot do that. You can think of it as having one shape which commands two results. The first is to add colour (fill/stroke, at the very least, but you can do more, e.g. use gradients as well); the second is to shape text. In this context, almost everybody just wants to use the text-shaping facilities — and disregard the colouring/filling ones, deeming them to be irrelevant.
Here is a silly example, which, for the sake of the argument, I've kept to a bare minimum, just to illustrate what I cannot get done correctly.
Start with a rectangle shape, making sure you've got a fill and a stroke defined for it. Then make some distinctly visible rounded corners. The whole point here is to make the rectangle shape slightly more complex, i.e. instead of four anchor points, the path will have at least eight (which means that scripts "expecting" a pure rectangle will fail). Switch to the Text tool and click inside the rectangle (the cursor should show the I-beam with a marqueed circle around it), typing way too much text inside the rectangle, so that some gets clipped. Something like this:
Make sure that the settings for the text include a fixed leading. As I've learned from other threads (here and elsewhere), by default, these days, Photoshop will have the leading set to (Auto) by default. This means that when changing the shape, the text will also be resized (!) which is not what we want here. To make sure that the text remains at a fixed point size, the trick seems to be to set a fixed leading as well, and Photoshop will then do the auto-flowing correctly, keeping the text at the original font size.
Also note that Photoshop automatically created two layers, one with the shape, the other with the shaped text. There is a relationship between both, but that relationship is not the obvious one.
All right, so now we want to distort the shape a bit, and for the sake of this example, I'm just picking one of the lower left anchor points and dragging it out, using the Direct Selection Tool. Note that I'm on the text layer, although I'm changing a path. This makes sense — after all, this is not merely "a text layer" but a shaped text layer. Therefore, I'm changing the text's shape. Makes sense, right?
When I release the mouse, this is what happens:
Where is my shape? Why did just the font flow into the "new" shape, but not the original rectangle?
Wait.
So the theory here is that I'm just changing the text shape, not the rectangle shape, which is on a different layer. All right, I can change the rectangle shape as well:
... but the text doesn't flow! In fact, on the image above, I have switched back to the text layer, and I can confirm: its shape wasn't affected in the least — if you zoom in closely, you can see that the text is still conforming to the previously selected shape. In other words: it's not as if the text was not correctly shaped, or only approximately shaped. No, it has acquired the complexity of the original shape (it's easy to note because there are these extra anchor points — the more complex the shape is, the more obvious this will be).
On the other hand, even on the layer panel, you can see that the rectangle was changed as expected.
So what happened here was something irregular: the original shape was "applied" to the text (as expected), but once that happened, I got two layers, each with its own copy of the shape, and completely unrelated to each other — each can be independently manipulated but not simultaneously.
Right, I thought, so the way to deal with this is simply to link the two layers together — change one, and the other will change as well, correct?
Well, no. When the two are linked together, moving the shape will only affect the text shape. Why, I have no idea:
Obviously, I also tried to merge the layers together. Not surprisingly, the result was that the shape disappeared — the rectangle remained there, of course, but it's not editable any longer, only the shaped text can.
There are workarounds — the first one being obvious: just cut the text, change the shape, paste it again. And do it for as many times as you need, until you are happy with the results. Well, this is hardly practical when I have a very, very, very complex shape, and even changing just a few pixels here and there can have dramatic effects on how the text flows. Believe me, I've been doing that for the simpler cases (like the one above, which would be the most basic of all). Even that way, it's a pain.
I've also tried out the reverse approach: don't worry at all with the balloons/rectangles. Instead, just focus on the text. Start with a rough estimate on where you wish your balloons to be. Add the text. Naturally enough, it will require lots of adjustments to be "just right". So, go ahead, edit it, reshape it, change it as often as you need/wish, possibly even hiding the filled-in balloons themselves, so that things are not that confusing. When you're finally happy with the results, then select the shape as a selection (it's an option from the Paths panel), and just let Photoshop fill it in.
That's cheating, of course, and it has a major drawback: because the shaped text is actually on an invisible background, it might not be easy to position it exactly where you wish if there is a highly complex background (visually, it might be hard to see exactly where the text + shape is — even if you make the shape visually thicker/a different colour than cyan). And if there isn't a highly complex background, well, in that case, you might not even need balloons
I was hoping that this was the kind of thing that could be fixed with a simple search around the Web. Something like a checkbox on Preferences saying "allow text shape to be sync'ed to original shape" (or vice-versa) or "do not duplicate layers after applying a shape to text". But in my searches — which, admittedly, cannot ever be considered comprehensive these days — the two most common answers I got was "that's impossible" or "you can do it, but it requires extremely complex scripting". Even ChatGPT and Gemini were stumped with my question, and, while providing extense step-by-step tutorials (impressive!), the truth is that I could not reproduce some of the steps — they did make a lot of sense, like, click on "Make path from work selection" which should have been possible, but in my case it's next-to-always greyed out, and when it isn't, it doesn't do anything useful — maybe because I have the wrong kind of "selection"...? The other thing is converting from "Point text" to "Paragraph text" (also mentioned by humans elsewhere), which also makes some sense... but once you shape text, that option disappears. Try it! One assumes that Photoshop (at least in 2024...) "knows" that "point text" is useless when using shaped text, so it automatically converts it to paragraph text and does not have a way to reverse the change (except by removing the shape — which, of course, reverts things to un-shaped text, which can be freely converted again to point or paragraph).
That said — I think I'll do it old-school — separate layers for balloons and text, and adjust everything manually 😞
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As for text reflowing to custom shape sizes - there isnt anything (yet) for auto reflow based on shapes.
However this is the easiest I have found.
Create your custom shape (I used the pen tool) then use the Type tool to add the text inside the shape as a container:
When you want to edit the shape - select and cut the text out, then reshape the object.
Then use the Type tool to readd the text and paste:
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