I have spent now considerable time to make sense of Text COMP and Geo Text and while one RFE would be to make it a bit more intuitive, my main point is that it is ridiculously difficult to apply existing Typography knowledge to both, to just make some simple layouts with different font sizes. I have a hard time to imagine that any Graphic Designer was involved in their creation.
The oOperator Snippets kind of underline that, because, yes - it is very easy to make all kind of chaotic, weird stuff that has not real world application, like spreading italic and multicolored words around space, but there is not a single example that shows how to make a nice page with 3 different font sizes - a task that is very fast and easy to do with designer software like InDesign.
My aim was to dynamically create social media tiles with simple, but beautiful typo that dynamically adapts to different formats, but it lead me down a rabbithole of workarounds and uncomfortable editing options that made me seriously question the usefullness of these components, that imho should enable us to exactly that kind of stuff.
I am happy to sit down and discuss how this could be improved, but I recommend to involve a person with serious knowledge about typo. I can make the connection if you like.
I concur; development required, because even when you do master the ops, performance is dire. A solution with the scope of something like lettering.js should be the goal.
I recently attempted this- I built a network using Web Browser base for super typography control then went 3D via the Trace SOP⌠but it ran even worse than the other text tops.
Touchdesigner is so close to being a contender as thee goto for all your gfx needs. A simple, powerful and performant typography tool would make that happen.
Thanks for the comments. The Text COMP and Geo Text COMP utilize the third-party text library Slug which you can read about more here if youâre interested: https://sluglibrary.com/
If you guys have any specific examples where youâd like to see improvements we would love to talk about it or forward them on to the library developers if applicable.
I agree with this. I will often add a red rectangle to help me figure out where the âlayout boxâ exists.
This gets tricky when you adjust alignment or add multiple lines. It would be great to have a toggle to show these layout boxes in a render pass or something.
thatk you for pointing that out.
I guess the library is also not really directed at Graphic Designers, judging by their examples.
So I guess what I am missing is a wrapper for the sheer functionality that employs established design workflows. I guess that is then not really a topic for nodes but for a component that
could live in the palette. Simple things like being able to select a text and make it bold (instead of pasting tags into the text that are visible sometimes and othertimes not).
I feel that is a bit over my head and time budget, but great to have.
The main thing I miss form the library implementation is justified text.
Things adresses on page 25 and 26 of the manual.
Yeah, slugâs main focus is really performance and rendering quality, and a bit less on higher level layout, but there is definitely room to build out those features as we go forward.
The DAT editor works a little like that internally for doing language highlighting. Weâre parsing the text and dynamically inserting directives to change the colors of individual words depending on the syntax.
Down the road, weâre hoping to add support for markdown syntax where we would convert those symbols to directives automatically as well.
Regarding the justification: I donât recall why that might not have been implemented, but I will check it out. I did just try a quick test using the âjust(true)â directive, but that wasnât working so there may be another limit behind the scenes.
@harveymoon Adding an automatic page layout box has been on our RFE list for the Geo Text COMP for awhile now. Iâll see if I can get that moved up the priority list.
