String to Curves (Geometry Nodes) - Update Needed

The experience of using the String to Curve node in Geometry Nodes feels broken.

It is very difficult to get instance data (position, index, id, scale, rotation) into text strings. It’s even hard to pass a random number into a text string.

There is so much potential for making amazing text-based procedural work in geometry nodes, but the limitations of the String to Curve node make it nearly impossible. I realize this has to do with the fact that it is field data, but this kind of thing works with other instance-based operations, so I would imagine it is possible here.

If instance data (and random/noise data) could be easily passed into a String to Curve instance it would be an incredible tool for things like future UI and motion graphics work.

Thanks for listening to my rant.

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I came here today to make this post more or less. But I will comment here to voice my support. As someone who does data visualization, I would benefit greatly from string to curve instancing and storing unique string to each instance.

For what?
What is impossible to do right now, what requires a lot of work for this…?

For example here.

I have 30 years of global data. I’d like to plot the year for every # of lines. As it is now, I’d need to do this by hand. Best case scenario I create an array of text objects. Realize isntances, then manually change each strings value.

Or here, what if I wanted to label every point above a certain threshold?

Or, if I have a topographical map and I want to plot the elevations across?

The string nodes don’t take fields as input

image

And if I plug my string to curves as an instance, there are no nodes to update the instances information.

When they add loops this will be easy as we can just loop over our locations and put a unique text there. But for now it’s not possible procedurally.

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