The current alignment feature of VSE Text strips keeps resulting in bug-reports, which are dismissed because the Anchor function working as intended, however it’s not working as the users expect, which is an Alignment function.
Here’s the problem in a nutshell:
Ex. Reports:
https://developer.blender.org/T69569
https://developer.blender.org/T71082
https://developer.blender.org/T54443
https://developer.blender.org/D6178
https://developer.blender.org/T46155
(There are also older ones, but I rather not spend too much time on this)
The surprising thing is that the text alignment feature(auto-center) was already implemented by Antonis Ryakiotakis in the first Text strip patch: developer.blender.org/rB145d3540b3e2dafa9351c79a463c230304ce0ae5 as showcased here: youtu.be/Q-qMPzhFNwg?t=211
However it was removed in this patch, and replaced with option to center Anchor X: developer.blender.org/rB3443686399feb4f96a9ea85f52f6750388b883a2
So the question is if this should be reinserted as a Left, Center(in patch), Right(new) alignment enum with the classic alignment icons from a text editor and the current Alignment X/Y should be renamed to Anchor X/Y(which it is)?
The current Layout UI:
Additional suggestions for improvements:
- The Wrap Width of 0 means no wrapping, which is puzzling to users. A more consistent solution with the rest of the UI, would be a checkbox to enable Wrapping instead, and written as percentage as the values below.
- The location is written in percentages of 0 > 1 values, a true percentage writing in the UI would be writing those values as 0% > 100%
- The default values should produce a standard looking subtitle in the default 1080p resolution.
- Text outlines and text box(+opacity) options would be useful to produce standard looking subtitles.
- Add option to view text box outline and anchor point in preview(this will make the Location/Anchor X/Y options much more understandable.
- Use ‘\n’ for line breaks, until a multi/line widget is added to Blender.
A mock-up:
