Designer friendly Text COMP and Geo Text

Wishlist and RFEs
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Hello D,

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.

All the best
Stefan

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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.

1 Like
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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 you’re interested: https://sluglibrary.com/

If you guys have any specific examples where you’d like to see improvements we would love to talk about it or forward them on to the library developers if applicable.