Bug? Text effects in "Fonts" window not appearing in output

[MattM]

In QLab 4, are all the standard Quartz text effects in the "Fonts" window supposed to be available to us?  

When I'm creating a text cue, I go to the "Text" tab under the inspector.  There, I can write out the text I want in QLab's default font.  I select the text, then click the "A" icon at the bottom left to open the fonts window.  From there I can choose different fonts and change the text color without any issues.

Along the top edge of the Fonts window are a series of alternate text "decorations," including underline, strikethrough, and drop shadow (which includes an on/off setting, and four other settings to control the opacity, blurriness, distance and angle of the shadow).  

Let's start with what works -- if I select the "underline" decoration, I am able to see the underline BOTH in the Text inspector tab, AND in QLab's audition window and output surfaces.  So far, so good.

But when I try to add strikethrough, the strikethrough shows up in the Text tab preview, but NOT in QLab's audition window or output.

Same with the drop shadow -- I can compose a very nice looking drop shadow in the Text tab (which I can see against the black background by highlighting the text -- it's definitely there and being rendered properly).  But the drop shadow doesn't appear in the audition window or QLab's output surfaces.

I presume this is a bug?  Is there any reason why some of the stock "text decorations" work but others don't?  I don't have a huge need for strikethrough but it'd be a heck of a lot easier to make drop shadows with Apple's stock tool rather than with a custom quartz composition in the Video Effects tab.

See attached image for an example -- the text decorations all render in the Text tab of the inspector panel, but not in the audition window.

Thanks,

Matt

[micpool]

I'll leave others to comment about why these effects don't show up in the output render, but it's clearly a different render path,  as the output is not affected by the LCD font smoothing setting in System preference while the text in the Inspector is. 

I use a drop shadow Quartz Composition for this by  Jean-Jacques Boutaud which I downloaded here, and works well

http://belightcommunity.free.fr/display_file.php?id=49

You will probably want to edit the QC to give a more restricted range to some of the numbers to make the controls fine enough to use in QLab

There are some problems with using Quartz Compositions for this.

In a typical case, where you might have a hundred text cues and want to change the drop shadow from say red to green or change the offset. Because fancy paste doesn't include video effects there is no easy way to make this change across your 1000 cues.

The auto width feature will crop the effect applied cutting off the drop shadow at the edge. This is easily rectified by manually setting it to a higher value, but this may make the case for an additional feature allowing a delta value e.g.+10, which would expand the auto value to allow for the width of any effects applied to text  (This would also apply if a way was found to use the built in Apple  font drop shadow)

You can't fade certain parameters of video effects e.g those of type color. so there is no way of changing the color of a drop shadow with a fade cue. (This would be the case with the built in shadow as well)

Mic

[Chris Ashworth]

Hi Matt,

This is a casualty of switching the underlying mechanism to better support things like line height and related features that were added in 4.1 — while the new mechanism supported these new features it appears to not support some other formatting like text shadows, which we didn't realize at the time of the switch.

We have it filed in our issue tracker in hopes that there may be a work-around.

Best,

C

[MattM]

Thank you, Mic, for being (as usual) Johnny on the Spot with a quartz composition for Drop Shadow.  I spent about 45 minutes last night trying to find one but clearly I wasn't using the right terms for it.  I'll play with it and see what I can come up with.  In my case I actually have a very limited need for them, and only on one screen.  I'm populating the static elements of this display with material I've generated in Illustrator, and simply trying to get the dynamically-generated values in QLab to match.  So it's a handful of cues to tweak & not a huge deal to adjust this one time.  But your point about this not being a great solution for huge numbers of cues is well taken.

And Chris -- thanks for jumping in as well.  I know there's a lot of complicated plumbing under the hood.  I'm about two months out from this project, so I'll keep an eye on this thread to see if a workaround surfaces.

Matt

[micpool]

On Wednesday, January 10, 2018 at 12:45:44 PM UTC, micpool wrote:

In a typical case, where you might have a hundred text cues and want to change the drop shadow from say red to green or change the offset. Because fancy paste doesn't include video effects there is no easy way to make this change across your 1000 cues.

You can actually  program round this limitation using a combination of OSC and Applescript.

Applescript allows the custom quartz filter of a video effect of a cue  to be got and set (OSC doesn't)

OSC allows individual named parameters of  custom quartz compositions of a cue  to be got and set (Applescript doesn't). 

OSC only has 32 documented video effects it can access (which doesn't include Custom Composition).

However the undocumented  number of the Custom Composition effect is actually 1000, e.g. /cue/1/effect 1000

Mic

[MattM]

Mic, is there a trick, maybe something else one needs to do, in order to use this drop shadow QC?  I downloaded it and dragged it onto the "Apply Effects/Custom Composition" window in my video cue, but I don't see any change, even at extreme settings.  I thought it might have something to do with the "protocolInput_Image" and "protocolOutput_Image" requirement, but looking at the QC in Quartz Composer, they're both in there and appear to be correct.  

Thx,

Matt

[micpool]

Firstly, It looks like the internal drop shadow this is shortly to be fixed. It's working in 4.2 alpha

FIXED: A regression that prevented drop shadows in Text cues from working properly.

In the meantime, until this is released I just downloaded a new copy of  http://belightcommunity.free.fr/display_file.php?id=49 in case I had forgotten I had edited it.

It worked fine straight off the download.

Here's a screenshot of it.

The only thing that means you often can't see it straight away is the default blur setting when QLab initialises it's effects sliders.

Mic

[MattM]

Oh!  Good to know it's coming in 4.2 (and thanks Chris and team for your work on this!)

As far as the QC goes...it turns out I failed to heed your warning about how over-the-top the range settings are in the QC.  When I use minuscule settings, I can see and set the drop shadow.  So it works & I'll finesse it to get something usable.  

Thanks as always for the help!

M2

[Chris Ashworth]

All credit to Brent on this one! :-)

[MattM]

Figure 53 guys -- I sent you an email about this just now -- in 4.2 alpha, the drop shadows do indeed work, but the spacing issue Mic mentions in his earlier post is still there.  In fact, if you're using right-justified text, taking the text out of "auto" and bumping it up a couple pixels only causes the text to shift.  It doesn't affect the shadow, which is still cut off. 

This is also true in 4.1.6 -- if you try to get drop shadows using the quartz composition Mic mentions, for right-justified text the shadow will be cut off no matter how wide you make the text.  Not that there's usually much call for having drop shadows that fall the opposite way, but if you put the drop shadow on the left side of your text and change to left justified mode, the drop shadow gets cut off down the left side as well.

Thx,

Matt

On Thursday, January 18, 2018 at 12:40:39 PM UTC-5, micpool wrote: