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Sunday, April 25, 2010

Blender text alignment.

While doing animation for Durian, I daily run into a silly UI deficiency while animating character faces. We use a system which presents us with a long list of sliders with number values. The problem is that it's very hard to scan down this list to quickly get an overview of the values, because the centered alignment. Blender does this for all number values and sliders, and it becomes apparent how bad this is in examples with long lists of values. I started looking at alternative solutions, here:




The two alternative solutions I could think of both have different advantages, but I think you'll agree that either is nicer that simply centering everything.

4 comments:

  1. There's also a third alternative solution:
    http://gustavgoransson.com/temp/blender_ui/3_alignment.png

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  2. As Gustav said. It's only a matter of deciding what is the biggest value the sliders can have, and then set enough space between word and numbers. Is a common DTP job. You may also evaluate the needed space dinamically, based on the current larger value

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  3. As Gustav said. It's only a matter of deciding what is the biggest value the sliders can have, and then set enough space between word and numbers. Is a common DTP job. Or you may also evaluate the needed space dinamically, based on the current larger value
    lsscpp

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  4. gustav: nice, that's another option too. Issue is that the layout engine would have to analyze the group to find the largest number, plus the words would move around when numbers increase.

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