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Variable Text Editor - MAC


TroyM68

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I did a search for my issue and found the same question and an answer back in 2008.

 

I need to be able to zoom in the Mac Variable Text Editor. Has this not been addressed since 2008? When working with business cards... and fonts down to <5pts... I cannot read the text even with a magnifying class.

 

Can you please give an update on this issue?

 

Thanks!

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jwhittaker's solution is a good one, although it may require editing the Zoom section of the Accessibility system preference. Alternatively, I have gotten used to just increasing the font size in the text editor to a readable one for editing and then setting correct font size last.
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Speaking on behalf of PTI, unfortunately, I don't have any new information to give you other than the same answer we gave back in 2008. The zoom functionality exists on Windows because it's built into the Rich Text control that the FusionPro plug-in uses, but the corresponding control that FusionPro uses on Mac doesn't have this feature. The only practical way to add this functionality on Mac is to build a completely new custom Rich Text-type edit control, which would require a fairly major rearchitecture. Such a rearchitecture would not only be a big project, but it would open up a lot of risk in terms of backward compatibility. To date, the benefits of having a zoom control have not yet, in our estimation, exceeded that amount of risk. More to the point, the benefit of having a zoom control on Mac is much less than the benefit that could result from doing the same amount of development work in other areas. In other words, the ROI of re-engineering our whole approach to text editing and fonts on Mac and creating a lot of platform-specific custom code, just to have zoom, is not very high.

 

That said, we are aware of the discrepancy between the Windows and Mac versions, which goes beyond simply whether there's a zoom control. Customers who use both platforms know that the way fonts are handled is different between Windows and Mac as well; specifically, that FusionPro has a paradigm based on font families on Windows (where each font family has up to four styles, or faces, based on the combination of bold and italic), but loads more styles of fonts on Mac. This is something that we do plan to address long-term, but I don't have any kind of time frame to share. I will say that it's just as likely as not that a future version of a template design GUI for FusionPro VDP, which has the same functionality on both Mac and Windows, may not be a Mac- or Windows-specific app or plug-in at all.

 

Speaking as just someone who has reached the age where tiny text is hard to read, I have to wonder why you even want to print 5-point text on a postcard in the first place, especially if you expect a human to be able to read it. And even if you do actually need to output 5-point text, I have to wonder whether you really do need to type it into the text editor, set the size to 5 there, and then zoom in to read it. If it's just some fine print legalese, then instead of typing it into the Text Editor, you could just hard-code the text into a string in a JavaScript rule and prepend it with a <z newsize=5> tag. Or, just read the text from a plain text resource file, which is probably a good idea anyway if it really is legalese that can change over time.

 

I mean, it's kind of the same as the answer to the question of how to output 30-inch tall letters for a billboard. You don't actually need to set the point size in the Text Editor to 2160 and start typing; you can (and arguably should) make the entire output file smaller and just scale it up when it's printed, especially since fonts are vector art, which can be scaled to any size without loss of resolution (although even raster art on a billboard is like 1 DPI). Or, at the very least, you can set the actual point size via tagging. The whole idea of the Text Editor GUI is that it's WYSIWYG, i.e. What You See Is What You Get, so if you can't see it printed out, then you can't necessarily see it on the screen either.

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  • 2 weeks later...
jwhittaker's solution is a good one, although it may require editing the Zoom section of the Accessibility system preference. Alternatively, I have gotten used to just increasing the font size in the text editor to a readable one for editing and then setting correct font size last.

 

This is the solution I have been using. The one issue I've had is that some of my text boxes will have more than one size of font so it becomes rather tedious to increase the size and then get it all back to the correct size.

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This is the solution I have been using. The one issue I've had is that some of my text boxes will have more than one size of font so it becomes rather tedious to increase the size and then get it all back to the correct size.

You could set all the point sizes in the Text Editor to some multiple of what you really want in the output, and then before all the text, call out a rule that returns a magnify tag to scale them all back. If you make all the sizes twice as big in the Text Editor, then you can use a rule like so to scale them down 50% to the size you really want:

return '<magnify type=text factor=50>';

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