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Text Styles are too restrictive


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Is there something I am missing with text styles?

I have a text style called "General Notes" that I use for general notes, and I want to use this to label my drawings. Some of my notes are to the left of the drawing and these are all Aligned Right. The notes that I have to the right of the drawing are Aligned Left. This is fairly standard with Architectural documentation.

 

My understanding of Text styles in Vectorworks is that in this case I need to have 2 text styles; one to align left and one to align right. Now if I want to have the same font, size and attributes, but align bottom middle, this will require a third text style that fundamentally does the same thing but has a custom alignment.

 

So, unless I am missing an obvious setting, what is the point of text styles? If I change alignment on styled text, it turns to "unstyled" and therefore will never update. It seems like I have to have a different style for every minor variation of text which defeats the purpose of a style.

If I have to adjust 8 text styles to change my "General Notes" text across the board, then where is the efficiency in using text styles?

 

I would have thought that a check box allowing you to set (or not set) the alignment value of a text item (similar to the 'copy and apply styles' function in the windoor tool) would allow the functionality of text styles to go from horrendous and useless, to actually quite a powerful utility.

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I completely agree.
 

It would be a massive improvement if text styles could have a TRUE, FALSE, IGNORE setting in the same way that some of the numbering tools in the Spotlight workspace do.

 

This could also apply to colour settings which are ambiguous at best. 

 

Text Style Scaling could also be improved. Perhaps the addition of a scaled label in the Object Information Palette would help. 

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  • 4 months later...

When I started using VW 30 years ago I created scripts for all kinds of text & dimensions - styles, sizes, classes (e.g. class 'Text', 'Site Text', 'Site Dimensions', 'Text in 3" scale details", etc.) And when done they would 'PopAttrs' back to None class. They helped me perfectly for many years, until VW introduced Text Styles. Now other than the problems mentioned by other users above, the Edit Text Style dialogue box doesn't' even allow one to set class! And what's even worse, the PopAttrs command in all my text & dimension scripts doesn't work anymore!

 

Edit Text Styles.jpg

Script - 9 pt Flux.jpg

Edited by SIDUG
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On 3/30/2021 at 9:00 AM, NickMac said:

So, unless I am missing an obvious setting, what is the point of text styles? If I change alignment on styled text, it turns to "unstyled" and therefore will never update. It seems like I have to have a different style for every minor variation of text which defeats the purpose of a style.

Actually, even though the text turns to unstyled it may still update after the style gets updated as I have found out. It depends on the kind of change that turns the text to unstyled. E.g. manually changing point size of the text will make it unstyled, but if you change the font of the style then the supposedly unstyled text may change its font accordingly anyway.

 

Despite that, the text styles should definitely become more robust.

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Webflow is an excellent graphical CSS editor. In the typography panel, you can create paragraph styles and quickly assign them to any new or existing text. You can rename, duplicate, remove, or create new styles on the fly. You can override any aspect of text style without breaking other inherited attributes. Need an H1 exception that is right-aligned? Override the alignment attribute and inherit all other attributes. Need a P style with a slightly larger font? Override font size and inherit all other attributes. Change your mind? Option click on the override to reset.

 

In the screenshot below, I have an H1 named "Grid Project Title". It inherits attributes from two "higher" styles, which I can easily see and edit at the top of the panel. Below that, you see all details of the font style (font, size, color, leading, etc.). Orange attributes are inherited from the master style. Blue styles are overridden. Click on a blue style to reset to the global attribute.

 

InDesign, Quark, and Affinity Publisher all have clever ways to manage text styles. I have experience with all of them, but Webflow is by far the best. It's simple, flexible, and intuitive. Webflow has incredible UI/UX designers. They clearly thought about this long and hard, and it works beautifully. Vectorworks should just copy this and be done with it. They cannot improve upon this model.

 

1143679491_ScreenShot2021-08-02at9_24_14AM.thumb.png.ae919f250f15cd58e527f333dd730b15.png

 

1085284548_ScreenShot2021-08-02at9_04_23AM.png.4ec5662db5be03e450cb927e0a3e3717.png

 

 

1711285637_ScreenShot2021-08-02at9_19_20AM.png.e2726d49c44b69aad81655bbb439ba17.png

 

754082709_ScreenShot2021-08-02at9_19_49AM.png.18dc994d186a7c5c4a1bbcaf0ca12ccc.png

 

1647137172_ScreenShot2021-08-02at9_19_02AM.png.3775c1827623ce2149c00feda104dea4.png

 

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