Variable Text questions?

[feetsdr (mike)]

A noob here! I’m looking to make sticks for plants. 1 - 2 lines of text on each stick.

For info like this:
Line 1 Line 2 Quan
Germanium 25
virginia Bluebells 40

I can set that up with 25 lines of Germanium and 40 lines of Virginia Bluebells in a CSV

But:

1. Anyone know if variable text can be given the table showing quantity and it will use the first line for 25 sticks and then go to the 40 lines?

If not, I guess I have to look for a macro that will take my table and make the 25 lines then 40 lines in another spreadsheet (or build it manually… but I have LOADS of different species to do this with).

2. Some species are 2 lines or 1 line of text. Any way for lightburn to be able to center the %0 text vertically in area allocated for %0 and %1 if there’s 1 line of text or fill the %0 & %1 fields if there’s 2 lines of text? Or have to do the 1 line species together in a different template with just %0?

THANKS!

[ednisley]

@feetsdr

use the first line for 25 sticks

The Variable Text formatter just slams the fields from each line of the CSV file into the variables laid out in the design, so you must duplicate lines to get duplicate tags.

If you’ll always have multiples of, say, ten tags, you can lay out ten tags with the same CSV variable to get ten identical tags from every CSV line. For reasonable numbers of identical tags, you could duplicate the lines by hand in a text editor and be done with it; having a few tags left over wouldn’t be the worst possible outcome.

@feetsdr

center the %0 text vertically in area allocated for %0 and %1 if there’s 1 line of text

The Ignore Empty Vars setting will get you close to where you want to go, but not quite all the way:

Shape Properties and Variable Text - Variable Text - LightBurn Documentation

[feetsdr (mike)]

@ednisley

The Ignore Empty Vars setting will get you close to where you want to go, but not quite all the way:

THANKS!!! after changing the Y align to middle for each text box which was just the 2 lines of text:

%0
%1

I am right where I want to be… curious - what issue were you thinking when you said not quite all the way!? Me, I think you nailed it!

THANKS!

[ednisley]

@feetsdr

when you said not quite all the way

I vaguely recalled it didn’t work as you just showed, but … hey, we all learn something new every day around here.

[thelmuth (Tim Helmuth)]

Not sure exactly how you got the single line text to align vertically centered. I did the same test and my single line text remains in the same location as the variable. I have the text set to middle, both horizontally and vertically. The top 2 have items in both fields and the bottom 2 are just single items.

This is my result. The single items remain in the location that the variable rests rather than centering vertically.

I would be very interested in seeing how you achieved this.

[feetsdr (mike)]

OOOOH! I might actually be able to help others?!

I think it might be Ednisley’s comment about enabling ‘ignore empty vars’ that you might have missed?

Here’s the file I am making - feel fee to roast my file : ) Spacing isn’t firm yet. And I’ll turn off layer 2 from engraving. I just did that layer 00 to help with spacing (before I found that Lightburn will create an array when you give it spacing between the text boxes : )

test sticks6.lbrn2 (670.3 KB)

[feetsdr (mike)]

I saw that the docs say:

Ignore Empty Vars : instructs LightBurn to remove newlines preceding empty Variable Text fields when aligning text.

Maybe when you were doing it, each line was it’s own text box?

I was envisioning, with my luck, it wouldn’t do what I needed because I didn’t use a ‘newline’. Like in word, there’s line breaks, paragraph breaks, etc. So hitting enter on the keyboard doesn’t always create they type of linefeed you might need? But it DID work out. So this is great!

[thelmuth (Tim Helmuth)]

That was the answer to my question. Now, if it cold only wrap to the next line if the length exceeds the box size.

[feetsdr (mike)]

Don’t hold your breath? Been an suggestion for 3+ years

Auto line wrap for Text Merge/CSV

It would be useful to have an option to automatically wrap the words inside a cell to a new line when the sentence crosses a border. This could be achieved by grouping or linking a shape to a text-box. All words that go over that border will be placed on a new line beneath the previous line. So the space between the word will replaced by a newline. Hope the explanation gives the possibility to add this feature in a new version.

But look into squeeze? or in the spreadsheet you use for making the csv?

if you have 1 or 2 lines of text, they’d be in col a or a&b…

If your box is 10 char wide (although yeah, the letter I will take less width than W) and 2 lines high, have an equation in col d - if col a’s text length is more than 10, cut the length of text of col A to 10 and put it in col D. And put the characters over 10 in col e.

Then use just D & E to make the CSV? Would work if you don’t have text in col b for that row.

Follow? not sure if my thinking is getting typed clearly : )