Graphics

I found this in page 8 of the XPression API tutorial PDF:

"Fonts are global objects in the XPression project, and therefore you should be careful not to continually create fonts without ever deleting them."

This should be in the XPression manual... it is not generally how other CG programs behave. I know 2 people who learned this the hard way. I realize it that the XPression program gives you a warning, but it can be confusing if you don't understand that all fonts must be pre-defined, or what global objects are in the first place.

Can you explain more? I don't know if I understand global objects and I really don't understand why you can't have several fonts. Granted, I like my project clean but I'd still like to know what issues I should expect if I add too many fonts.

#XPression

That context of that comment was in reference to external API applications which dynamically create fonts. It was a warning to API programmers to not create fonts continuously (thus leading to millions of font's in the project and eventually running out of memory). As a user of XPression it's not something you really should be concerned about. You're not likely to ever reach that limit..

#XPression

Ah, got it. Thank you.

#XPression

With other CG programs, you can create text using a particular font, and you can play around and resize it, and it is not part of a font preset, until you store it as one. You could create a bunch of lines of text, set them all to different font faces and sizes, and never store any presets.

With XPression, any time you create text, its font settings (typeface, bold etc) automatically become a font preset, and if you use the same font preset on another page and resize the text, it will resize the font anywhere that font preset is used on other pages. This is not mentioned in the manual!

If you are not careful, you can end up resizing text that is on other pages. It gives you a warning first, but really I was surprised that this happens. I know someone who couldn't figure out why his font sizes kept changing, I don't know if he used an older version of XPression that failed to warn you first before it changed fonts on OTHER pages as well.

When you are creating a new show look, you would really need to plan out all your font sizes and then create all the font styles, before creating any text fields, to have everything go smoothly. If you start with one template and copy it to create the others, or if you create things on the fly, you have to be careful :)

I figured that this behavior meant that the XPression program considered all text to be part of a group of objects.

Sorry for the confusing post.

#XPression