Text vert. alignment 2: Offset relX, relY

• Oct 20, 2012 - 10:42

Second instalment about text vertical positioning.

How "Offset relX" and "relY" (in "Style | Text" dlg box) are supposed to work?

If a text is not in a frame, they seem to do nothing; this probably makes sense (I do not remember how they worked in 1.2 and testing text formats in it is not straightforward...). If this is the case, it would be convenient to have the exact conditions for them NOT to work listed, so that documentation can be updated accordingly.

If the text IS in a frame, their effect is mostly unexpected. The previous behaviour was to position the text reference point at some X, Y percentage of the frame and then align the text itself on this reference point according to its alignment flags (left / centre / right, top / middle, ...).

Now, they seem to work the other way around: first the text is positioned in the frame according to the alignment flag (where TOP means align TOP of text with TOP of frame, MIDDLE means align MIDDLE of text with MIDDLE of frame, ...) and then the text is displaced of the offX/offY percentage of the frame size(s). The very concept of text reference point seems to be gone.

Reaching a given result is probably always possible, but it is not obvious how; for instance, how to vertically align the middle point of a text at the golden ratio of the frame height?

(Of course, this also affects horizontal alignment, but horizontal alignment has usually less requirements).

Questions:

1) Is this intended to work this way or not?

2) Is more work planned in this area or this was the intended as a definitive solution?

Thanks,

M.

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