Text - Token Type

Text Tokens define entire strings of text that change the written copy of your designs when applied to a text layer.

Design decisions

Text Tokens define the written content in your designs and can be applied to text elements.

Useful for:

• UX writing

• Creating themes for different languages

• Capturing translations

• When your product or brand names are still being iterated on

Text Tokens can be attached to String Variables in Figma.

Possible values

Text Token can have any combination of alpha-numeric values and may include emojis.

Hard-coded string values

Hard-coded values of Text Token would be a string of text you define directly.

For example, a Text Token named welcome.message with the hard-coded value of:

"Hello world"

Values that reference another token

When trying to reference another Token as the Value for a Text Token, you will see Tokens in the dropdown list that are:

• Living in Token Sets that are currently active.

  • In the left menu on the plugin's Tokens page, a checkmark is visible next to the Token Set name.

• Token Type is compatible:

  • The same = text

However, like all Token Types, you can "force" a reference by manually entering the Token Name between curly brackets.

For example {token.name.here}

Jump to the guide on Token Values with References by selecting the card below to learn more.

Nested references

Text Tokens can also reference another Token nested somewhere within the value.

For example, a Text Token with a Name of customer-id with the hard-coded value of:

Jan Six

When referenced within the value of another Text Token with a Name of app.home-page.title:

👋 Welcome back, {customer-id}!

Which would inherit the text content from the customer-id token and have a resolved value of :

👋 Welcome back, Jan Six!

This is a great way to communicate to engineers the design decision to have text content; in this case, the client name comes from a database.

You could even add some notes in the Description of the Token for engineers, like "show the preferred name as the client ID if it exists in the database."

Apply Text Tokens

You can apply a Text Token to change the written content of a text layer in Figma when the Token is applied.

With one or more text layers selected in Figma, click on the name of your chosen Text Token in the Plugin to apply its value instantly.

For example, if you select the bounding box that a text layer is in by mistake, the Token is applied to the parent frame and no changes will be made to the text layer as it is a child.

Once a Token has been applied, it will remain attached until you manually remove it.

W3C DTCG Token Format

Text is not yet an official token type in the W3C DTCG specifications. Tokens Studio has added Text as an unofficial Token Type to support Figma's String Variable.

Transforming Tokens

Engineers typically transform Tokens used in code with Style Dictionary, which is tool-agnostic. Tokens coming from Tokens Studio require an additional step: @Tokens-studio/sd-transforms, an npm package that prepares Tokens for Style Dictionary.

When transforming Text Tokens, there are specific transforms to be aware of.

The preprocessor in the SD-Transforms package will automatically convert the Tokens Studio specific Token Type of text to align with the Style Dictionary compatible Token Type of content.

→ SD-Transforms Read-Me Doc, Using the preprocessor

Resources

Mentioned in this doc:

• SD-Transforms - Read Me

• Style Dictionary - https://styledictionary.com/

• Design Tokens Community Group - W3C Draft

• Design Tokens Community Group - 8.0 Types

Community resources:

• None yet!

💡 Something to share? Submit it here!

Known issues and bugs

Tokens Studio Plugin GitHub - Open issues for Token Type Text

• Unable to Assign a Numeric Value in the Text Token Type #2470

  • When the value is purely numeric, results are unexpected.

🐞 If you are experiencing an issue not listed here, please reach out to us on the Troubleshooting channel of our community Slack, submit it on our feedback tool, or send us an email [email protected]

Requests, roadmap and changelog

• None

💌 Visit https://feedback.tokens.studio/ to contribute or subscribe to updates.