Some comments on Line, Arrow and Text

[tomczak]

Welcome changes - now it's easier to enter multiple text boxes.

A suggestion, I'm not sure if practical: clicking near an existing control point makes it current, but the point/line doesn't change its appearance - this may be a feature, but it sometimes makes it difficult to figure out which point/arrow am I adding another control point or text box to.

Another observation, which may or may not be intended, if a control point is selected and Text button pressed, a text control window appears. If I close the text control window and leave this same point current, clicking on it doesn't bring the control window again (a text processing info window briefly appears). To edit text in the current control window I can either click on another control point and then go back to the one I want to edit text for, or I could toggle the text button twice.

[jsachs]

I have fixed these issues for the next release.

[tomczak]

Great! Thanks.

One more observation: in Line, Arrow and Text tool, the text control panel, the Macro and Unicode buttons seem to be disabled. They work in Text transformation.

[jsachs]

Fixed for next release.

[tomczak]

Last observation (extremely nitpicking) - I just noticed it when checking if the Macro button worked so I'll share it despite it not being really important in most cases.

If the Transparency is more than 0% and the line is Broken, not curved, the transparency of line nodes doesn't change and it remains at 0% which may make them visible as small circles on the lines, especially when the line is thick. This only affects polyline middle nodes, not the endpoints.

[tomczak]

In the process of illustrating the previous comment, I discovered something else.

If a line has a Text box attached, clicking the OK or Apply buttons seems to close the Text control dialog box for the current line first (which in turn removes the text box) and the text box is not part of the output.

The workaround is to create a dummy point/line and move the focus to it, then hit OK/Apply.

[tomczak]

And there is one more thing I noticed, which actually may be a feature: it is possible to enter a new line node outside of the image on the canvas/margin around the preview of the input image.

[jsachs]

For the next release, I fixed the out-of-bounds click and move problems and the disappearing text box problem.

The circles on semitransparent lines will be a lot harder to fix and will have to wait for a later release. The circles are there to fill in gaps between the rectangular segments of broken lines. This works OK if the lines are opaque since the overlap does not matter. To fix it I would have to render the lines opaque to a separate layer and then composite that with the output image using the transparency setting.

[den]

To supplement Maciej's observations and perhaps a duplication...

Ref: v8.0.114.0

If the following "*.arrow" transformation script is loaded upon a 800x450 pixel solid color image and Oked:
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arrow 0 nx 800 ny 450 amount 1 -1 0 0 ″Amount: ″ ″Mask″ line_width 10.0025 head_size 4.9887 transparency 0 color ffff heads 1 style 0 line_style 0 has_text 0 text_info 0 ″...Text...″ ″Arial″ 80 4 1 0 0 ffffff 0 255 255 20 0 0 5 1 0 5.036 -45 50 10.0819 0.5043 0.3795 display 2 sync_scroll 1 auto_preview 1 narrows 1 arrow0 10.0025 4.9887 0 ffff 1 0 0 2 0.5037 0.3787 0 0 1 1 0.7955 0.7394 0 0 100 100 has_text0 0 text_info0 0 ″...Text...″ ″Arial″ 80 4 1 0 0 ffffff 0 255 255 20 0 0 5 1 0 5.036 -45 50 10.0819 0.5043 0.3795

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TEXT.JPG (17.18 KiB) Viewed 3440 times

1) the text does not re- appear until the "T" button is selected upon re-opening the transformation.
2) an OK does not close the Text Drop Shadow dialog. Arrow color (if opened); Text; and Transformation dialogs close.
3) Text does not remain centered in the text box background when a drop shadow is used. Believe the shadow transparency amount control also shifts the text background box.

...den...

[jsachs]

For the next release I fixed the problem of artifacts where semi-transparent line or curve segments join.