Reverse Order of Text Elements in Figma

Question

I’m wondering if it’s possible to reverse the order of text elements in Figma. I.e. what if I wanted to have the largest ‘Typography’ text to appear on top and the smallest ‘Typography’ text to appear on bottom? Is there a quick way to do this in Figma / are there any Plugins available that will do this? I tried the Reverse Layers and Reverse Layers Order plugins - and they did not actually reverse the elements in the art-board, just their order in the layers panel.

Answer 1

The position of the layers in Figma's layers panel bares no relation whatsoever to their position on the page, so trying that route will fail. Also I can't find any plugin that would do this for you.

If I were to do this, I'd do it like this instead.

Set up the text initially like this

1. Type the text as a simple list in the one text box, instead of separate text items

2. Use Enter between each line of text

3. Set each line of text to the desired font size

Now to reorder the items

1. Select the bottom line of text

2. Cut it (Ctrl+X), press Backspace to delete the blank space left behind

3. Click to move the cursor to the line you want to insert it into

4. Paste (Ctrl+V), and press Enter

5. Repeat until finished

An example

Answer 2

I found that if you'll do each of the following steps, you can get close to a solution. With all elements selected:

1. Shift + V — Flip vertical

2. Shift + H — Flip horizontal: result is all layers are rotated 180°

3. In the right panel, set rotation to 0°. This will rotate each layer in place so they are not flipped anymore.

The only issue here is that the elements are now right-aligned:

So I had to go back and drag each of them to the left side one by one. Still a pretty decent solution.

Edit: In order to left-align the elements, you can press Alt + A or use the buttons at the top of the right panel.