User text field questions

[furtonb]

Hi,

I have some issues with the user fields that I would like to share with you:

1.Is there a way to make the Properties panel stay while I’m editing control points? If I select them, the Properties panel is going to show the current viewport’s information, which is not really helpful. Use case, for instance: I would like to eyeball a rough goal of a curve area (e.g. a site boundary), now I have to either use grasshopper or click back and forth, since I cannot monitor the changes. I could also create a text only for this, but that’s just way too much clicks, when it could be shown right in the panel.

2.When I try to access user text in text fields, Rhino crashes on me randomly when I try to edit it – no reports, whatsoever. (It just silently disappears, which I find strange, but it happens a lot lately.) It’s not really convenient way of editing, because a certain text is not having a relative link to its host object, which means all text copies will be tied to the original one. I have to always edit each to show up proper information after copying, so a picker tool would be very welcome to link the GUIDs to the text fields in a faster manner. I don’t know, how it should be handled properly, but I would expect something like this: if one copies only the text, it should reflect the same values, but when the object, whose user field texts are referenced is copied as well, the text field should update the GUID automatically to reflect changes in the copy object. I know, that there are several other cases (multiple objects are referenced, the users intention is something else, etc.), but in general I would say this could be a nice time saver feature.

I can also echo the wishes expressed in these threads:

Duplicate Textfields along with corresponding objects

Is it possible to duplicate a curve and text object (with a text field referring to the curve object name), so that the text field of the new text object, refers to the new curve object? Current behaviour: Curve A Text Object: Curve A ↓ copy Curve B Text Object: Curve A Requested behaviour: Curve A Text Object: Curve A ↓ copy Curve B Text Object: Curve B If this is not possible, what’s a good workflow to work around this? I use object labels often and it is tedious to constantly re-…

Title Block with Text Fields

Continuing the discussion from several other threads… I hope to get a constructive, but specific, discussion going about where we are with regards to automating Title Blocks. What is possible? What is not? Are there workarounds? Bugs? Current platform is Rhino 6 for Windows. I don’t do much detailing in Rhino (for one, that would require instant Make2D with hatching, etc - but that is a different story). Also, I work in heavy industry and I’m sure requirements for other sectors will differ. Th…

Text variables in layouts

Yes, but if would have done that we won’t still be in business. We would have never gotten the things that aren’t available in other products. Hence, no reason to buy early versions of Rhino.

3. I cannot edit the value fields in the properties panel. I’ve tried double clicking into them, is there something, that I’m missing here? Using the SetUserText command is a bit awkward to me, so if it’s by design, please consider making it possible to edit the keys/values over there in the Properties panel, but I suspect it is rather a bug.

4. To my knowledge mathematical expressions are not possible yet. Is there a way to access user fields from grasshopper and write data there?

Thanks!

[pascal (Pascal Golay)]

@furtonb

If I select them, the Properties panel is going to show the current viewport’s information, which is not really helpful.

This seems like the stopper here - perhaps Properties should assume that the control point parents are selected and not nothing, when points are selected. I don’t know if that is possible.

https://mcneel.myjetbrains.com/youtrack/issue/RH-49570

I can edit the key and values here… it’s a kind of click and wait a half-second thing to get the text field to wake up for editing.

-Pascal