Text Objects are great!

Features & Ideas
1

Hey!

One of the last couple of updates introduced text support for the speckle viewer, and the rhino translator can now send text objects that display crisp and clear in the speckle viewer! Amazing!!

Noticed some possible improvements on this functionality that might be worth mentioning:

  • text justification not working, defaults to top right in Speckle which can offset text position from the original modell.
  • I could not figure out an easy way to create such text objects in Speckle from Grasshopper. I can think of several workflows that would benefit greatly from being able to send localized 2d/3d text somehow.

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Keep up the good work!

2

I think these text objects are just sent as curves for now, but the plan is to have them become actual text objects sometime soon; this will allow for scaling, justification, better readability etc…
Thanks for the feedback :slight_smile: !

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3

Wow. Nice! In that case there must have been a serious upgrade in how speckle handles curves. I remember that before the letters got heavily distorted, (especially the rounded letters being converted to very coarse polylines) which really hurt the readability of the result. These look pretty much perfect now. Looking forward for the next version of this!
Any recomandations on how to get this result from grasshopper?

4

Hi @Andrei ,

The web team did implement native Text conversion in the viewer back in June, kudos to @alex for the pretty text you are seeing now! He would be able to give you more details on any plans to improve how text justification, scale, etc is handled.

Currently Grasshopper does not support TextEntity objects (which is what we’re sending from Rhino) so our GH connector cannot send text at the moment. It’s likely that we’ll wait until whenever Rhino 8 releases, since that will include expanded GH support on entities like Text, Hatches, and Dimensions, to add Text conversion to our GH connector :sweat_smile:

5

Thanks for the reply, sounds like a plan!

6

Hi @Andrei

Thank you for the feedback! :slight_smile:

Indeed, text objects are handled ‘natively’ are not longer made up of curves like they used to be. As of yet, the implementation is still lacking a few features, consistent text justification being just one of them, but we are planning on improving it more in the one of the next iterations

Cheers

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7

I learned something new too! :open_hands::smiling_face_with_three_hearts:

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8

@clrkng Ressurecting this thread with an idea:

I was just thinking about this again: We can actually programmatically create rhino TextEntities in GH that in theory would be able to be handled in the same way as in Rhino. Would it be easy to just port this functionality over from the rhino object converter to the grasshopper one for this type of objects?
This would be a temporary fix untill better support is added in Rhino 8, like you mentioned.

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9

Hey @Andrei,

I just checked the code and I don’t see anything preventing TextEntities from being converted in Grasshopper, though I haven’t had time to test this yet.

What happens if you pass them through a ConvertToSpeckle node? (if you don’t see that node, go to the top-menu Speckle → Tabs and activate the Dev Components

10

Hey Alan,

Thanks for checking in so fast. Getting warning text : “1. Cannot convert item {0;1}[0] to Speckle” . Blank output

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Yup this also occurred to me, it’s definitely a possible workaround but would require us to implement TextEntity support in GH as per this part of our converter @AlanRynne (I’ll let you decide whether to enable or not, ie if there are other downstream consequences to doing so for a type not natively supported in GH)

12

Oh i totally missed the CanConvertToSpeckle, it seems like ConvertToSpeckle doesn’t have this condition though :sweat_smile: oopsies

I think we can definitely enable this but we’ll check and get back to you!

13

Sounds great, I cant wait to test this!

14

Hey @Andrei!

This took a minute but you’ll get it in 2.17 :wink: PR is currently awaiting merge:

You can also test it on our latest 2.17.0-rc3 which should be released within the next couple of hours. Please be aware release candidate should be functional but if you find something that’s not quite right please let us know!

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15

Hi @AlanRynne I tried sending TextEntities from grasshopper in connector v.2.17.0. It sent okay, but seemed to corrupt all the geometry in the viewer as a version showed up but with nothing in it.

Sending Text would be very useful.

Can you figure out what might be going wrong? Alternatively I can send a sample file.

16

Hey! Chiming in here since i tested this but forgot all bout it. I could send analysis result meshes as well text labels on them to Speckle and everything worked fine in the viewer. eventually. It did take a few tries though. Only issue is that the justification is hard locked to top right, so unless you account for that when placing the text objects everything will be out of wack.

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17

Hi @Jonathan_Rabagliati , we’ve just looked into this and it turns out the viewer wasn’t handling Text objects with no assigned RenderMaterial or DisplayStyle. We have a PR from @alex to fix this, and in the meantime if you try attaching a renderMaterial to your text objects that may resolve the viewer issue!

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A post was split to a new topic: Text Entities are not support in Rhino 8