Text placeholder text improvement



  • I wanted to see if the text tool could be improved. I saved a screen video but you know what it currently does

    Right now when I click, it creates a box the size of my existing font choice - it has the "Lorem ipsum", which is fine, but then it has the blue fill over it. At small scale you don't see the default words and the box looks gray. Also when I scroll over the letters, they shake a little - is there a reason for that?
    I'm fine with leaving the text the size chosen at the top of the screen. Could we also have the text tool increase the scale of text when we click and drag - as it is in Affinity Designer?

    Illustrator offers just a blinking text cursor and dragging on initial placement makes it a text fill box... I don't love that option
    Affinity offers the option to click and start typing or drag and resize before you type with a single blue letter placeholder.

    What if VS offered the scalable letter or the scalable phrase - no highlight overtop but make either the single letter or phrase itself gray or light blue?
    It might be neat to see the phrase resize in blue - just my thoughts



  • @Boldline The 'blue fill' you mention is the placeholder text being automatically highlighted in blue so you can quickly change it by typing something else. I for one am fine with that.

    When hovering any object, including text, the app displays a thin contour so the user knows that if he clicks then and there, that object will be selected.

    I also prefer a single Text tool that works in two modes (simple click results in a text shape, click-and-drag creates a text frame), but maybe beginners won't figure out both modes without reading the documentation.



  • @b77 I understand what you are saying - the blue highlighted fill seems totally opaque when the text size is not super large and so when you begin to type, you can't see what you're typing. Maybe if the highlighted box was a lower opacity that would help?
    I just noticed the text box seems to default now to 12pts, even when I have changed it ahead of time at the top of the contextual menu. I'd prefer it take the size from the existing pt size and not default to 12pts



  • @Boldline When zoomed out or when the artboard is big so that 12 pt text looks really small, the letters of the text you just added are not displayed since they are too small to be "deciphered" anyway. This is called 'greeking" and I think that's why the highlighting looks totally opaque in this case.

    I just tried changing the text size before clicking on the canvas to add it and here it works — the 'Lorem ipsum' text is added at the desired size. If it doesn't work there, or it's something else I'm missing, use Recordit so the developer can see exactly what's going on. 😉


  • administrators

    @Boldline I open a bug, to use the last selected text size when creating text shapes.

    About the additional tools (scaling) while in text mode. In AD the resize box is shown around the text.
    I think this could be added later if it does not complicate things too much.

    In VS the same is achieved by selecting the pointer tool and resizing the text just like any other object (but this deactivates the text tool).

    One thing that VS has: when editing a shape text (a.k.a point text), when holding Command the baseline can be adjusted as a regular path.
    And selecting the node tool, will edit the baseline as a regular path.