It seems an odd oversight to exclude text from the mask layer. I can understand not putting in by default and the graphic portion does this but there must be extra code/checks involved to force the text exclusion and I don’t see why that would be done.
It looks like you are misunderstanding the SolderMask layer; it is a negative, it shows where the SolderMask will not be. It is the only inverted layer.
It exposes the underlying CU for visibility. See the image above for how not visible the Solder mask makes the underlying CU and how that affects text.
Do keep in mind that the 3D preview also doesn’t show the text in the mask.
Selecting the mask as the active layer does not help, It does show the graphic but not the text. It’s specifically just the text that does not show up.
I did find that for the silkscreen version I had to turn footprint text on (there also appears to be no way of moving the text out of the footprint text items pseudo layer but that’s a different topic), however that does not affect the mask. It only affects the silkscreen and Cu layers
Please explain exactly what you want to achieve.
If you want the text to be exposed HAL/ENIG from the soldermask (I do it many times), it is enough to place Text on Mask layer only.
Single Text object is applied to a single layer only.
As stated earlier, the SolderMask layer is an inverted layer; it shows where the SolderMask will not be. The 3D viewer will show either the color of the bare board material, or as shown in my example above, the copper from a zone fill.
Also, keep in mind, that in your shown screen grabs, it is not obvious if you are working with the Front side or the Back side of the board.
Again, this is really easy for KiCad to do. Why not try to duplicate the example I provided above?
OK, as I prepared the footprint to share I found that the slightly modified (to protect the innocent) version worked. So I tried replacing the original via Update Footprint and it still failed. Finding that odd I then simply deleted the original and re-inserted it and it worked. It appears that something wasn’t getting updated with the footprint update for some reason.
That makes sense as a diagnosis. Of course there’s plenty of times that text is just graphics.
This also shows up in that its display is toggled separately from the layer it’s on.So that it can be marked as show on the footprint and turned off elsewhere.
It may make sense to have the capability of marking the text as simple graphics.