Text (EX9) in beta24 explained

Hi All

the past couple of days I have been using the Text (EX9) in beta24 quite a lot. and some questions rise from that.

The Multi line feature is really handy but I have not yet seen the relation between the size of the letters and the number of lines, which makes it pretty hard to make something as simple as bread text with varying numbers of lines.

Is there some documentation of how these features work some place? a fresh help file might help.

please see attached patch

-sunep

Patch asking how Text (EX9) work (7.2 kB)

hi, i had same interrogation with beta23. i think size is also relatively in function of screen projection, wich is more larger than -1x1 and do not fit scale as you are pointing.
please devvvs , an asnwer ?

I took a quick look at the patch, and although I don’t really know that node well, this is what I found out.

In your patch, if you put Normalize (which is now set to ‘both’) to ‘width’, then the width of the text will stay the same (and seems to be calculated automatically), and the height will vary. Since in your example the text is the same, the fontsize also will not change.

You could also put ‘normalize’ to none, but that didn’t give me any results. I suppose you need proper values for the rectangleXY pin, to inform the node of which rectangle you want to draw on.

single line and spread…

TextInBeta24.v4p (9.0 kB)

Correction: rectangleXY don’t really matter with normalize=‘none’, but the produced output with the font-size you used is so huge that you don’t see it, so you need to ‘zoom out’ a lot, by attaching a scale node to the transform, and by setting the scale to 0.01 or even smaller…

TextInBeta24.v4p (8.2 kB)

Ok

I am getting closer to an understanding.

@antokhio
I used to use the single line and spread, but I would like to use the multi line functionality of the Text (EX9) to make my patching simpler.

@ft
Got it, it is ok for me to scale down hugely to get the size I want. I think it has to do with the letters sort of being quads and having an individual letter scaled more or less as a quad.

I have made some adjustments but now I want the text to be left aligned and I can do that by using GlyphInfo into a map node, but I feel that is a bit of an awkward way of doing it. I seem to remember that Text (Ex9) could align so that either the left, right or the center is in 0. but it does not behave like that anymore.
the problem using the dimensions given from the Text (EX9) instead of from GlyphInfo is that it needs a framedelay and thus will create a flicker when the text goes to a wrong position before being pulled back into position.

See the attached patch for an example. Am I right that it is this complex to make Left aligned text?

sunep

TextInBeta24-AlignLeftv4p.v4p (21.7 kB)

Text (EX9) is back to normal.

@tonfilm

Is there a new addonpack on the way with the updated Text (EX9)?

sunep

yes… very soon!