December 2017 Challenge: Harmonia

[waldronate]

Maybe at the last minute?

### Latest WIP ###
Harmonia.jpg

[- JO -]

Hi !
Nice map...
I don't know if you have some time left, but the text is really difficult to read... you might want to remove the effect on the font ? That would help, I think...

[Mouse]

I can see you are quite taken with the new Symbol Fill styles

It looks really good, but I have to agree with Jo about the text. Maybe turn the text dark and have a pale glow?

Maybe also a bit less squashed together?

[waldronate]

The best way to find out what's missing from a feature is to use it. In this case, I realized that I need to add rotated grids (that is, I don't always want my rows and columns aligned to the world axes). I also need to do random varicolor and some other little tweaks that would make the results less obviously mechanical.

I should probably adjust the text, but I was already past the deadline last night and didn't want to spend a huge amount of time on it. I had a bit too much text in the box and having to manually insert line breaks was a royal PITA (and not the good kind of royalty that you're willing to forgive that sort of stuff to). Without the black halo on the text, the trees in the background were making it nearly impossible for me to track the text. The white box helped a little, but not enough. I'll see if I can get some time before this closes.

Text handling in CC3 is on my list of things to look at for the new year (after my experiences last night I really want a "flow text to shape" feature to let me just plop down a block of text without having manual line breaks, but I don't think that it will get high enough on the priority list to see any action). I'd also like some dynamic text sizing controls like in Photoshop, but there are so many other things that need attention first. At the very least I'll be try to fix the text pickers so that the system doesn't instantly crash when certain features are selected. I had hoped to have a solid block of time to look at some of the more involved sections of the code, but it looks like that's not going to happen for a long while. Light and fluffy features like SYMFILL will continue to be the order of the day for the near future, most likely.

[Mouse]

Flow text to shape?

Dynamic text sizing controls?

Oh YES PLEEEEEEESE thank you very very much you wonderful man

But I can wait.... a bit

[waldronate]

One of the biggest limitations of CC3+ is that all of the custom code is just drawing assistants for the underlying CAD engine. It's pretty straightforward to do the reflow stuff, but it will be tough to change the reflow after the initial placement because there isn't any direct way to express the idea "this text is bounded by this shape" in the software. It's probably going to be a bit lower on the list than some other things and how things get developed will largely be determined by ProFantasy's product priorities.

That is: "Any mention of features, real or imaginary, should not be considered as a contract to provide said features in anything resembling a useable form on any human timescale."

[waldronate]

### Latest WIP ###
Harmonia.jpg

[Mouse]

That's better! I can read it now

Good stuff

[waldronate]

I forgot how much Microsoft's text render leans toward "clarity" at the expense of proper layout. That text wanders in and out of the box depending on the zoom level.

[Mouse]

There's no easy way around that one. I usually render the map so I can see where its going wrong, then zoom in and out in the FCW file till I can reproduce the same positioning errors, and work on it at that particular zoom till it looks right.

But you seem to have got it all under control anyway, so I'm probably teaching my grandma to suck eggs again