I must be confused; I don’t see any references to the text editor above.
These are always helpful; I’m sorry you may feel that we don’t take these topics seriously. It isn’t our intent.
Thanks Steve! I’ll make a video maybe over the (Canadian) thanks-giving long weekend (next weekend).
I guess
It’s way up in the first post. But it’s far from exhausting on the potential improvements with the text, which are discussed in other topics. But my advice is to not spend the time digging up those posts and simply study AutoCAD’s text editor. AutoCAD clones also have similar text editors.
I’m surprised that Eto doesn’t have something you can just plug into Rhino. I’ve researched text editors and their format(s) a little bit (rtf). I realize that the super/sub script isn’t so simple and is implemented within the programs themselves. I’m still trying to figure out why Autodesk’s is so good, yet basically everything else’s is so basic. My hubris is telling me I can figure it out but probably not. There’s something to it that I’m oblivious to, and with how bad the text editing is in Revit (relative to that program’s budget) I’m not setting high expectations, but I will point out that any improvements will go a long way.
I have made some C# scripts that will help out immensely, at least with my style of drafting.
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Block-text / justified formating alone would help me a lot
subscript and superscript, please
And support for all font styles, not only Regular. Font styles for some opentype fonts are not displayed in Rhino, only Regular style.
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Oh yes!!
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and make it all work. by now i have resigned altogether to fight the bugs.
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Also, combining various font types, Bold and Italic in a single text is important.
Having control about line spacing is cool, and I’d love to see one fragment aligning to the left while other part being centrally aligned, anything, basically, that makes text looking rich.
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I agree; under the hood we do support subscript and superscript. Unfortunately the controls that we use for editing text do not support this. We are going to have to investigate completely replacing the current text input control with something else in the future.
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i am a bit sceptic because that is a very important topic, would that mean that you would entirely redo fonts as they are functioning currently?
No; we need to investigate creating new user interface for creating and editing text. This is not a Rhino 8 project.
that is ok if that would be in v9, but i am really hoping that this will be cleaned up, so in that case yes but no for v8?
this portion sounds very nice i am just hoping that i can celebrate now as much i would like to.
Is there any possibility of adding a checkbox for “Support Rhino Escapes” and then letting people do something like
{subscript “this will show in subscript”}
or
{subscript}This will show in subscript{/subscript}
?
If the bottleneck for this is UI, that’s both easy to implement and has an easy path when you upgrade (the explicit checkbox means that you don’t have to guess whether a user wanted that as literal text or an escape sequence when you read an old file into V9).
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Yes, there are possibilities for hacks like this.
Used Sketchup’s Layout module for the first time these days (partner office delivered the design model as skp, and we have to proceed in 2d CAD).
I have to say: Sketchup’s 2d DWG export rocks!
It does colored hatches, according to the material color!
It even does the textures! In this case, a bitmap with the texture projection is placed in the background of the CAD lines.
We need this in Rhino. Very much. From layout space, yes.
Actually, this is oldschool stuff. The algorithmic part is solved, by many other players in the field. 2d CAD might even be boring in a BIM world (which becomes also kind of oldschool after what, 20+ years).
But it’s here to stay. Not a project goes by without the necessity to create 2d from 3d, and work on top of it.
I DO use Rhino’s layouting capabilities, and I dare to say I know them well in the meantime.
But although there is progress in R8 - keep it up!
Thanks!
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I made an animated GIF in this topic:
And it contains other useful tidbits of information.
I think the text editor definitely needs attention. One example I forgot to add is the fact that I can copy a bullet point symbol from the internet and past it into the text editor. If I can do that then how hard would it be to add that (and other symbols) to the drop down list.
Overall, it just feels like an incomplete system. Buggy and lacking features. Compared to a lot of the other stuff receiving attention I think improving the text editor gets the most bang for your buck.
Note that Autodesk did in fact split their text into two separate objects: DTEXT and MTEXT.
You can also paste superscript/subscript from WordPad and it works until the control eventually messes it up. We are using stock rich text editing controls on Windows/Mac and are finding that they are just not working well in many scenarios. We need to research and figure out if we can create a new editing control that works better.
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- Justified Text
- Managed Lists (bulleted, numbers, etc. Even as simple as implemented in this forum.)
- Subscript, superscript (although I love the drop-down list of standard sub and super symbols)
- Tab spacing.
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oh wow, please do share some tips! i’m finally now trying to streamline my workflow and left AUTO-CAD a years ago for Rhino.
I still haven’t figured out all of what it can do, as it’s endless but i’m interested to hear the general tips shared if you’re getting better value per hour than with revit.
Sorry for taking so long to reply. I’m getting better value per hour on specific project types and applications.
I posted my sample house project: https://www.food4rhino.com/en/resource/sample-house-project
Note that it only has one rating (1 star lol, not encouraging) and it was a test bed. I was previously a drafter/BIM technician and was quite good at Revit in my day. But I don’t actually do architectural drafting these days (but I would love to get back into it of course). The sample house contains a few elements that in my opinion were quite tedious to pull off in Revit. So although Revit is quite fast in certain aspects, the time saved gets cancelled out when dealing with many of the finer details (I suspect this is why I encounter so many incomplete Revit projects in the field).
It’s not glamourous and required lots of manual work and setup, but I am faster than I would be at even my peak skill level in Revit.
I had to put this project on the back burner… unfortunately I’m having to put all of my available time into AutoCAD right now. And with R8 looming I don’t want to invest too much time into an R7 pet project. I’ll be back at it at some point next year hopefully. If you have any questions or want me to throw together a half baked tutorial on how I created anything in that project feel free to ask 
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