Feature request: Disabling outlined fonts in PDF export

Hi,
I think it would be useful if the default behaviour when exporting PDF files would be that textpaths are kept editable (lefthand zero), rather than outlined (righthand zero). Obviously the textpaths will need to be outlined if they have effects applied etc., but perhaps there could be a "Outline type" switch on the Textpath node?

I frequently want to use OpenType features in Illustrator or edit typos after exporting graphics from Nodebox, but that needs non-outlined texts, so this keeps me working in Nodebox 1 most of the time ;-)

BR,
Jonatan Hildén

Hi Jonatan, sorry for the extremely late reply.

As you know, NodeBox 3 exclusively works with paths, so we have to convert text to paths to make it compatible with the model.

We probably want something where we add another node, called just "text" that returns text as an object and not a text path, thereby allowing you to change font / line height / typos etc. This does require a lot of work, though.

I've added a GitHub issue that tracks the development of this feature.

HI Frederik,

I had another request today from someone who needed to edit labels in one of my NodeBox-produced PDF charts. I had to tell her, sorry, strange as it may seem, no PDF application can edit any labels in any of my charts.

Having text paths instead of text also means you can't search any of my complex org charts or detailed financial diagrams. They would be much more powerful if you could search for things.

And text paths take WAY more space than text objects would. I recently removed all text labels from a diagram and it went from 5 megs to 43K. In fact the sheer size of text paths is currently the main limiting factor on how deep my "deep zoom" PDFs can go.

So while I understand that this would require a lot of work and would be a departure from your pure path model, I just wanted to make this feature request again. I would definitely use a Text Object node.

Thanks!

John

Hi John,

Text objects are actually in NodeBox Live. We've added them there for speed reasons: paths were becoming very slow. So it would make sense to add them to NodeBox 3 as well.

The issue we found is that users expect them to work with all kinds of other nodes, while they are in fact very different beasts. This requires us to have multiple implementations of transformation nodes, etc., and/or to automatically convert to a path where needed, which can confuse users as well.

So I'm a bit torn. I indeed like the purity of a single data type flowing through the network, but I understand we might need it for more "serious" work. I'll give it another thought.