[1.8.3] Uwanted behaviour in paragraph fields?

[LEB]

Paragraph fields are not practical when the selected text has different parameter values.

•     In the attached video, parts of the selected text have a different line height.
•     However, when the whole text is selected, the corresponding field is not empty but displays "0 pt".

I think this is an undesirable behavior that can considerably lengthen the search for discrepancies in the text parameters.

[GarryP]

Agreed. Displaying one specific value in a field when there are multiple underlying values can be misleading.

P.S. Not everyone can view MOV videos without installing extra software. MP4 is more-widely viewable.

[thomaso]

This issue was reported + logged a few times, for instance...

I experience improvement e.g. within the Character Panel only for the upper section with font size + font face (family + weight + style): for them the field is empty when text of various sizes or fonts gets selected.

For other text properties it appears to show values of the 1st char in a frame, regardless whether all text gets selected with move or with text tool.
For text color it also may depend on the order of the frame selection.

For object colors in the Colour Panel it appears to be related to the layers order and the order of selection
With a click selection the color of the 1st selected item seems to rule, whereas with a dragging selection the color of the lowest layer seems to have priority:

P.S.: @GarryP, in forum separated by OSses the macOS users might expect that others can view .MOV files. – Unfortunately in macOS the built-in screenrecording software Quicktime.app automatically saves in a .MOV container but with the h264 compressor, which actually is a lot more compatible than its container format. In the video above I just renamed in the macOS finder the file suffix from .mov to .mp4, – does it become compatible this way for your experience?

[GarryP]

I had downloaded the video and renamed the file with a .MP4 suffix to view it but I thought it was worth mentioning so that LEB is aware that some people – those without OS X (or iOS) and who don’t know the renaming trick – might not be able to watch the video directly on the site. (For me, when I play it on the site, it’s the same static image for 17 seconds.)

[thomaso]

> " (For me, when I play it on the site, it’s the same static image for 17 seconds.) "

Which one, LEB's or my renamed? (I assume you are in Windows, right?).
Also to me, in macOS, this delay when playing mac-bug forum videos happens occasionally. In particular it then shows moving content just for some seconds and then a static image only (while I see the playing symbol running). I thought that might be a download/streaming/server issue. – Do you think it's related to the video container format, too, even from macOS to macOS?

[GarryP]

To clarify: When I click on LEB’s original video, embedded into the website, without downloading and renaming, I get 17 seconds of what looks like a static image.
I don’t know enough about web sites or video formats to say why it happens, only that it does, for me at least.
Someone else on the site, in another thread, mentioned something about a codec that can be installed to allow MOV files to be viewed on Windows but I don’t want to do that.
Anyway, just thought I’d mention it for future posts.

[LEB]

Hi @GarryP

Thank you very much for this advice, I will do as you suggest in the future.

It is also because I expected people reading articles about bugs under MacOS... to be under MacOS, but that was not quite true.

I hope the indicated unexpected behaviour will be fixed.

[GarryP]

You’re welcome.
Even though I only use Windows I tend to wander around the site and read posts from non-Windows-specific areas as sometimes the same problem/issue exists on multiple OSes/applications, and sometimes there is interesting information that isn’t specific to just one OS/application but there’s no non-OS/application-specific place to post. For example, there’s no “Publisher Bugs for Any OS” section but the same problem may be extant on both Windows and OS X.

[Wosven]

When multiple objects are selected, displaying a "?" would be better, like in some other apps, the same for colours or text, since it can be misleading to read an inacurate value.

[garrettm30]

On 4/12/2020 at 3:41 AM, GarryP said:

P.S. Not everyone can view MOV videos without installing extra software. MP4 is more-widely viewable.

But contrariwise, not every Mac can export .mp4 videos without installing extra software. .mov is the format that comes with the built-in screen recording feature, and there are no export options for .mp4. Simply changing the extension may or may not work, depending on on the format in the container. This site gives instructions for properly converting, but it is more trouble than I want to go through (and using large software that I do not have installed) when creating a video is already a significant outlay of time

I get your point, but I do think that posting the Mac default format in a Mac bugs forum is appropriate.

[thomaso]

53 minutes ago, garrettm30 said:

But contrariwise, not every Mac can export .mp4 videos without installing extra software.

Are you sure? – Note that MOV is not a codec but a container format only, like PDF.

The .mp4 suffix names the MPEG-4 format and is coded with h264, a quite old and very spread compressor. Though the same .mp4 container in younger macOS (high sierra 10.13. and above) may become coded with the HEVC codec but it won't by default. – Might you possible experienced issues with reading (not writing) an .mp4 which got coded with that HEVC?

[Jeremy Bohn]

The built-in mac screen recording feature saves it as h.264 into a MOV container. You can safely change the suffix to MP4. I've tried this in Catalina, and on an older mac running El Capitan.

Found on the Apple Support forums:

If the MOV file only contains MPEG-4/AAC or H.264/AAC content, then you can change the ".mov" file extension to ".mp4" and most files will work as if the MOV container was actually an MP4 container.

[thomaso]

1 hour ago, Jeremy Bohn said:

You can safely change the suffix to MP4.

Yes, that's what I had done and described in my first reply. But @garrettm30's doubts came later, so I wonder what in particular is the issue for him with mov, h264 and suffix-renaming before upload.

[LEB]

Nota: In fact, I used VLC to convert the movie because it offers more options than Quicktime for smaller files… and the normal extension would have been .mp4.

[LEB]

It seems that the same undesirable behavior also affects other parameters such as here, the color of the contour of the images. One is white, the other black, yet upon selection of both, the color of the first selected is retained as color of the contour for both, as illustrated in the attached mp4 😉 movie.