I have been using the variable text feature to make lots of name tags lately and it has saved me uncounted hours. Thank you for this feature!
Just one suggestion for you to consider. The TEST button on the Variable text window is great, but would there be anyway for you to convert that button to a toggle? So I could just set it to always show the text it will send to the laser all the time. Then be able to toggle back to Variable Text edit mode when I need to make changes to the control characters.
This is because once I have the control characters set and filled in, I really have no more reason to see them and I spend a lot of time holding the TEST button down.
There are lots of places in the UI and editing code that assumes the text objects are editable. If I left the variable text showing, I would have to prevent you from being able to edit text on anything that was a variable text object (and you wouldn’t be able to create new ones) because you’d be showing the result, not the source, and it would be confusing if you left it on and forgot it. It’s doable, but it would take a while to make sure I caught everything.
You can ‘Convert to Path’ to bake the text into the design, but it loses the ability to edit it. If you did that and saved the output as a new file you could keep working from there. I want to add a command that converts variable text to normal text nodes so the text itself can be changed again, but that’s not done yet.