Adding several paragraphs of text to photo

[snowpod84 Profile]

I am trying to add a pretty big poem to one of my photos. When I put in all of the text in the text box and try to adjust by dragging the corner boxes the texts becomes blurry and unable to read. I have tried several different sizes as well as different fonts. Any suggestions?

[admin]

Is it possible your original picture is too low resolution? Or could you post a screenshot to show what it looks like?

Tony

[eadams Profile]

Hi Tony, never having entered more than a few words with the text tool, I never came across the problem that snowpod84 describes until I tried it out now.

It turns out that when I enter a long text, the text box does not automatically resize to contain the text. Instead, the text runs off the edge of the image on the right and left. I can only grab and drag the top and bottom resizing nodes, and when I do it stretches the text vertically. This has nothing to do with the resolution of the image.

SPE Text functionality.JPG (88.24 KiB) Viewed 7041 times

I tried resizing the text box before adding the text, but when I do that, I can't see any text in the text box after adding the text.

Text box stretched before entering text:

SPE text functionality stretched text box without text.JPG (74.09 KiB) Viewed 7041 times

With the text added, the text box once again stretches beyond the edge of the image and the text is not visible:

SPE text functionality stretched text box with text added.JPG (109.14 KiB) Viewed 7041 times

It seems that the only way to add a large body of text is to create a separate .jpg containing only the text and using the composite functionality.

[snowpod84 Profile]

That is exactly how mine does!

[eadams Profile]

That is exactly how mine does!

I'm curious to see what Tony has to say about this. There may be a solution that is not immediately obvious. SPE is great software, and it is well worth the price that Anthropics is asking for it. However, only the very basic functionality is user-friendly. There are several great features that are not easily discoverable (e.g. how a user can tag an effect with a keyword).

[admin]

I think I see what you are saying now. The answer has to do with line breaks. The text node will not insert line breaks for you, so if you have a lot of text with no line breaks, it will create a very long and thin piece of text. To break a line, place your cursor where you want the line to break and press return. If you break up your text into lines it wont be long and thin. Hope that clarifies.

Tony

[eadams Profile]

Hi Tony,

Adding manual line breaks to my text (it didn't have any) does the trick! I think the reason it didn't occur to me to try that in the first place is because snowpod84 had the problem with a poem, and normally a poem would have line breaks already, but maybe some of the lines were too long.

Adding manual line breaks is a satisfactory solution for me. Snowpod84, can you let us know if this solution helps in your case?