[Bug] Essential Graphics font styling not updating after change in source

[Shebbe]

Hi,

We've noticed a critical bug in Essential Graphics. The text is not updating outside of the EG comps when it's changed in the source. It updates the color but not the font size or type or other aspects. This problem wasn't present in v23 but seems to be in 24.x all the way up to this beta.

Steps to reproduce:

- Create comp with text layer with any formatting.

- Promote 'source text' in Essential Graphics of that comp.

- Make another comp and put that setup comp in it.

- Change the EG text to something else or link it to a new source text of a text layer.

- Change the font type and size inside the setup comp.

- The updates are not reflected outside in the other comp.

This has been a workflow breaking issue for us. Project made in 23 are completely broken and are only fixable by going to every place where the text has been adjusted and re-read from primary comp then apply the adjustment again. This is a no go for projects where such things are referenced over 100 times.

For new projects it's equally breaking workflow because we cannot iterrate such a design setup while already having promoted EG properties altered anywhere else in the project.

I hope this can be adressed with a high priority hot-fix before anything else.

Thank you!

[jakubfoglar]

This was happening to me as well even on previous versions. I came to the conclusion that it’s meant to be like that. But, +100 on your problem! I would also love if it worked like that.

[DaciaSaenz]

Hi @Shebbe, 

This is fallout from introducing Essential Properties in the Props Panel in 23.6 which added Font Controls to the Text Control for Essential Properties.  When the EPs were only in the timeline, in versions 23.5 and before, the only way to overwrite a Primary text control was by changing the source text via the Edit Text pop-up menu. It was not possible to change the font, font size, or faux style. So if users made changes to the font stylings in the EGP, those changes would cascade to all of the related text params in Essential Properties. This behavior actually breaks the concept of EPs at its very core, since no params should cascade out to all templated params once they've been edited.
But! that was the way it worked for years.

As of 23.6, though all of the sub-parameters of the source text control can be exposed via the Properties Panel.

• source text
• font
• font family
• font size
• font control

Changing the source text of the EP text overwrites the primary value and now becomes independent from the Primary Control. So if you change the font in the Primary Control, that change won’t cascade to the EP-related Text Controls if one of the sub-params listed above has been changed. The new model introduced in 23.5 also broke existing projects where font stylings are not respected in some cases.
i.e. even when the font parameters were not exposed in the EGP, the wrong font is rendering at project open.  


It's truly a mess. We've tried to get a fix developed but it's led to more convoluted problems and confusing design issues. 

I'm so sorry for this awful situation. It's no easy tasks to make so many manual changes. 

I'm wondering if there is a way to write a script to automate those changes so that you won't have to do them manually. 

I'm asking around and will update if I find a good hack. 

Apologies again, 

[Shebbe]

Hi @DaciaSaenz,

Thanks for the thorough explanation!

Indeed quite the conundrum at the moment. For our team the desire is primarily actually to only ever change the text itself on any instance of an EG setup elsewhere and not print the font styling along with it as soon as it's altered. This is because for our purposes we typically only ever need to change the information, but this may already happen before the design/font styling it is finalized.

Perhaps there can be a way to define explicitly only exposing source text when setting up EG comps in the future.

As a current workaround for new projects we parent the source text to a second text layer in the primary comp first and use that layer's source text as the promoted property on the EG panel. This way it doesn't matter that it's changed on it's instances because it's own text isn't shown because we just use it as a guide layer.

[Paul Tuersley]

Hi @DaciaSaenz 

I'm interested in the scripting side of this. I'm helping someone with a ton of EG filled projects that need updating (manually unless I can help) and it's noticeable script support is a bit lacking here.

All a script can really do at the moment is write to the EG text. Text only. You can read it just like a regular TextDocument with all attributes, but another recent bug is causing it to incorrectly return the primary text. So you can write text but not read what it currently is or even know if it's been changed from the primary.

Along with a fix for that, maybe we need scripting access to Pull/Push to Primary Comp. Then we could reset the EG props but still write back any text changes. Ideally we could also enable/disable and write those additional text attributes like font via script too.

I guess the text and other attributes should be treated separately in terms of whether they follow primary. Maybe you could make it so having those Enable Custom Font / Size / Faux unchecked causes it to revert to previous behvaiour where only the text is independent?