Behaviour of styled text boxes - VW10.5, Mac OS

[JHEarcht]

Joel,

Unfortunately, VW doesn't work like a Word Processor or Desktop Publisher. It magnifies the text editor to make it easier to type. But it also conceals the rest of the page so you have to use your imagination to adjust the layout.

Although text handling has improved a lot in recent versions, it is still tedious to do a lot of formatted text. With experience, you will learn some work-arounds to make the job easier.

One solution is to create your fancy text in a WP or DP and import it into VW. I haven't tried that in VW11, but if you want to try it, just post again, and we'll try to help. JHE

[JoelS]

I have previously only used small amounts of text for annotation (just a few words) but I now have a need for more presentational documents with larger amounts of styled text.

The behaviour of these text objects is, frankly, bizarre. In fact I'm not sure I believe my eyes.

1/. Clicking a text box to edit it causes the text to reflow as it expands slightly compared to the unselected state. This means it's impossible to have the text as you want it without many iterations. It also means that if you click on a box with the text tool where you wish to begin editing, the cursor actually appears elsewhere in the text and you have to find your place again.

This redrawing of the text also causes the top lines to be hidden beyond the top of the box boundary requiring the cursor to be scrolled into them so they be brought back into view.

What is causing the text boxes to expand and contract, reflowing the text each time?

2/. In Mac OS, if the text is coloured, when editing it, all the text is rendered black making it virtually impossible to edit these attributes. The text box fill colour is also changed to white when editing.

On Windows, these behaviours do not seem to happen.

3/. There is no auto-scrolling as you type and the typed text or the cursor just disappear off the bottom of the window.

4/. Window scrolling performance when editing a text box is extremely slow, slower than a window full of hundreds of objects.

5/. Pasting text previously coloured in another application appears correctly following the paste but is rendered all black when exiting the box and then remains black thereafter.

Editing text like this is a Kafkaesque nightmare - tell me I'm hallucinating.

Is it any better under VW11?

VW 10.5, Mac OS 9.2.2

Zoom 100%, Layer Scale 1:1

Adjust flipped text, No fill behind text - enabled

Rotated Text display: Highest quality

[JoelS]

JHE,

Thanks for your reply.

I'm not expecting WP, just competent text editing. I cannot think of a another Mac graphics application I have used in the last 20 years that has not had the capacity for WYSIWYG text. MacDraw circa 1986 did a better basic job of it - I just had a look.

The text is not magnified for easier editing - this is a bug. When not being edited, the text is scaled, spaced and kerned incorrectly, when editing, it appears as it should other than not respecting its bounding box and losing all colour attributes - this is a fault.

While it is certainly possible to build text externally, pasting will preserve the font and styles but not the colours - this mechanism is faulty.

In 2004, can WYSIWYG text still be a problem to implement?

Joel.

[jan15]

Joel, do you know about the word-wrap options, and hard and soft carriage returns, and tab stops in the newer versions, and the option to convert TrueType text to polylines?

I think the text editing is pretty good as CAD programs go, and adequate for drafting purposes. I certainly prefer it over Autocad 2004.

[JoelS]

Yes, thank you.

I'm sorry, but our standards should be higher than comparisons with the worst.

There are countless good things in VW, things that let us do our jobs in a way that might not otherwise be possible, that's why we are here.

But presented with something which breaks nearly every tenet of a graphical UI and is clearly defective, you have to say that it's below the standard we, and NNA, should aspire to.

Text handling up to VW10.5 is in need of serious attention - nobody should be having to make excuses.

Joel.

[mike46]

Hi

just some added info vwa11 on windows does behave properly in regard to text handling in new documents .however on version 10 drawings edited in 11 many of the short coming you mention(including the magnifed text and text off the bottom of the box ) are present . so the problem is not limited to mac

[JoelS]

Mike,

That's interesting. VW11 is probably coming here in the near future so I'll see if this behaviour is replicated on the Mac and I'll report back, unless another Mac user gets there first.

Thanks,

Joel.