I have been through a few pages of past questions on the topic of adding text to a drawing, and I haven't noticed anyone asking about my particular question.
I have seen that you can hit [SHIFT][ENTER] to add a carriage return in your entered text. I have also seen that you can set it to word-wrap so that you can change the formatting after entering the text so that it forms a nice block. This is great, and allows us to enter mutli-line text. I am curious, though, whether there is a better way to edit mutli-line items. Having to deal with hundreds of characters as a single line-item during entering and editing is... sub-optimal.
Are there plans for a way to edit text 'on the paper'? Or perhaps there is already a way that I don't know about yet?
Thanks for posting on the forum.
Having to deal with hundreds of characters as a single line-item during entering and editing is... sub-optimal.
Can you elaborate on this? We are not certain we understand the problem.
Thanks for letting us know when you have a minute.
When you explore a text item, the text is re-formed into one line, so you can't really see the formatting, and you have to scroll horizontally to find where you want to edit. If you could edit text the way I am editing this reply to you right now in a multi-line 'notepad-like editor' then that would be much better. Maybe there is a way to do this and I just haven't found it yet. I didn't see a tutorial on adding or editing text, but maybe it's in one of the other tutorials.
When editing a text through the Explorer, if you hold SHIFT while pressing enter, it will create a carriage return and make your text multi-line.
Let us know if it works out.
I realize that I can add a carriage return, but I'm still only seeing one line, so I'm not able to see the formatting. I have a 'one-dimensional' view of my two dimensional text, if you see what I mean. If there was a way to see the text the way I see it in the editor I am entering this comment in right now, then I would be able to see what I was doing. With the explore window I can only see 80 characters or whatever at a time. Yes, I can scroll around to move that 80 character window, but it's still a very limited view.
I would love to find out that I'm missing something obvious.
Indeed after entering a carriage return, the Explorer field remains on one line, thus making it harder to see that you actually have a multi-line text. But if you click OK on the explorer and try to edit the text again by calling 'Explore', you should see that the explorer now shows the text in multi-line.
Let us know if this works out.
(NOTE: We plan on eventually having the field expand vertically in real time as the text is being edited.)
I just tried what you suggested and I see that it does show multiple lines if I added carriage returns, but if I am relying on word-wrap the 'long lines' still show as one huge long line that I can't see. If I add all of the carriage returns myself and avoid word-wrap then it would work. Editing might be tedious because I will have to move the carriage returns, but it's something I can work with. I'm not writing "War and Peace" on here.
Thanks for getting back to us about this.
Sorry if we were not clear on our first reply, we were under the impressio that you were actually using SHIFT+ENTER and not using the wordwrap ability of the text object. (Which indeed lets the text on only one line when editing.)
In any case, we're glad the solution we provided seems to be acceptable.
I have a habit of adding a lot of text to schematics, because I need to make sure that my guys can figure out problems in the future with the panels that I design, so I will add charts of drive setup information, and lots of extra text about what signals come from where and what might happen if a signal is missing. This habit of mine means that I add a lot more big blocks of text than you might normally expect in a schematic, so a user-friendly method of editing multi-line text has value to me. I have to admit that I have never encountered a CAD system before that didn't have a multi-line editor for multi-line text.
The current solution will keep me going until you upgrade it in the future.
Maybe you could just have it edited on-the-page. Like, the user creates the bounded text-box and they can type in it in-place, so that the user can see what it will look like as they type it.
I will add charts of drive setup information
On that note, you may be interested in this forum thread.