Text Item alignment

[jkb]

When typing in Text I find it really annoying that the position moves when you add or change characters.

Is it possible to set the position & keep it locked.
So if 'Left Justified' then the 1st character will always stay in the same place when amending or adding additional text items.
The same should apply to 'Right' - the last character will stay in a fixed place & also for 'Center'

When making Menus we need all the text items to line up & it is very time consuming to have to keep moving them just because they are different number of characters.

 

I make a lot of Menus for various shows & competitions & waste a lot of time having to move items into alignment.

 

Jill
 

[jt49]

Did you try the settings:

Alignment: Left;
Center: X=-100, Y=-100 ?

[jkb]

Hi jt49,

Yes I have used center x= -100   This does keep the text in the same position when adding or subtracting characters
But it would be nice if I didn't have to remember to move the center point.

I don't work with numbers & normally move things visually.
I find the way the numbers work so confusing, it would be much simpler if everything was based on the main window size, but I know this would most likely make the programming harder.

Also it would be good if I could move a group of objects all together to the same pan X position.

E.G. I have 10 text objects down the screen & I want to align them all.
I tried selecting all the objects in O&A and typing in -90 in the Pan X box but this only moves the last object & not them all.
So I have to move each individually.

Jill

 

 

 

[Cedric Dawnhawk]

I think you are misunderstanding the meaning of the Alignment setting. Left, Centre and Right are only relevant when there is more than one line of text within a text object and determine how lines are positioned within the bounding box round the text object.

When making a menu, create one text object with correct font, colour etc and using the longest piece of text. Set its centre X and Y settings to -100. Drag it to a suitable size. Turn the grid on, select a suitable number of divisions, bearing in mind how many lines you will need, and turn snap to grid on. Position the text so it snaps into place. For the rest of the text items just copy and paste the first one, drag and snap into position on the grid and change the text.

Andrew

[jkb]

Hi Andrew,

I know the meaning of the Left, Centre, Right.

It would be helpful if when you select 'Left' it automatically put the centre point to -100

I do set up 1 text object & copy it for the others, but I still find I am spending a lot of time aligning objects.

When starting  a Menu I do not always know how many Objects I will need or what the longest text will be.
I find that it is if I have to reajust vertically that it takes the time.

As stated previously I do not like having to work with the numbers & prefer to drag objects visually in the window.

Yes I use the Grid, but again it is difficult to get the sizing right, you cannot get an even number of squares over the screen and it seems impossible to get the orange lines crossing in the centre of the screen.
I have tried all options of the Offset.

Jill
 

[jt49]

What we have to keep in mind is that PTE is not an office program. I myself like to use PTE as a presentation program even if my slides are rather text-intensive. So I make use of a workaround which may look cumbersome at first sight, but which works quite well and easy (if you become used to it).

I write my text slides in LibreOffice Writer, being much more comfortable than using PTE's text objects. Having finished a slide I save the original as an odt-text object (no background color), but also export it as a pdf-file. Then I open the pdf with Photoshop and render it to an image (at any resolution that I like to have), which just shows the text having transparent background. Then I export it as a png-image and insert it into PTE.

[davegee]

WRT the Grid.

The "Snap to Grid" does work but you have to be fairly close to the grid lines before the Snap occurs - perhaps a little more latitude would help.

[Cedric Dawnhawk]

Jill

By misunderstanding the meaning of Left, Right etc  I meant you are expecting them to behave as in Word etc which they do, but only with reference to the text box. The text box behaves like other objects. Yes it might be convenient for text objects if the centre moved automatically but this wouldn't be consistent. I don't think there is a great problem in setting the centre of one object to -100, -100 then copying it.

May I respectively suggest that you must have an idea of the number of items you are going to add before you start. Similarly for the longest text.

If you like dragging, then use the grid. You can  divide the screen into any number both vertically and horizontally. just uncheck "In pixels" and enter your desired numbers in the boxes. The orange lines just mark every tenth division. As Dave points out you have to be reasonably near the grid for the snap to work

To quickly realign a number of text objects select them all, drag them as a group until the top one snaps to the grid, hold the control key and click the one you just aligned so it is deselected, drag the remaining ones so the top one jumps to the grid etc

Regards

Andrew.

[Igor]

Yes, we consider adding of a Text box object in future version(s). It's in my TODO list. This object should help with typing of a text in PTE.