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Sub-Mesh Bounding Box

Experimental Feature

This is an experimental feature. To enable, check Enable Experimental Features in Preferences. Experimental features are only available as part of a Professional licence.

Intro

Create rectangles using the bounding boxes of sub-meshes (Duplicator, Text, SVG etc). See Sub-Mesh for more info on sub-meshes.

UI

Common Attributes+

Input Shape - Connect any other Shape containing sub-meshes.

Level - Set the level within the sub-mesh's hierarchy to affect.

Expand - Increase/ decrease the size of the bounding boxes generated.

Fixed Size - By default, the size of each bounding box is set by the size of each child mesh (e.g. each character in a text string). By unchecking the Auto (Width/Height) checkboxes, the bounding boxes can be set to a fixed width and height.

Specific Indices - Enter specific ids for each sub-mesh to create a bounding box around. Enter comma separated values (e.g. 0, 4, 7) or create ranges using colons (e.g. 1:4) or a combination of both (e.g. 2, 3:5).

Sequences Keep Gaps - When checked, where the Specific Indices attribute contains ranges (e.g. 0:3), they will be converted to a sequence (e.g. 0,1,2,3). This can be used as a way to unify the heights of individual bounding boxes across letters with ascenders/descenders (e.g. h and y). Note that this feature only works across one row – mutli-line text/sub-meshes are not supported.

info

Remember that Ids start at 0 so the first word in a string would be id0.

Example
  1. Create a Sub-Mesh Bounding Box Shape.
  2. Set its Fill Color to green.
  3. Create a Text Shape.
  4. Enter Sub-Mesh Bounding Box into the Text attribute.
  5. Connect textShape.idsubMeshBoundingBox.inputShape.
  6. Set the Level to 2 (Words are the 2nd level of the sub-mesh within a Text Shape).
  7. Enter 0,2 into the Specific Indices attribute.

Green boxes will be drawn around the words Sub-Mesh and Box.