Magic Move not scaling text

Magic Move is very cool, but it gets real sensitive-like when certain things are changed in the target slide. Text re-sizing is one of those. Haven't found a way yet to make it work natively yet.

My workaround has been to use Illustrator ($$$) or *Vector Designer* ($) to build a piece of text (make sure the Text Box has a Fill set to None, and set the Text Color to your preferred color). Then you can literally cut and past that text in Keynote, and because it's a Graphic Object it can be scaled, and because it's a vector-based you can scale either direction to your heart's content.

Of course you loose all the benefits of having it be defined as a Text Object by Keynote, but if that'll work for you, you're good to go.

i had the same problem. and what was going on was that the magic move was conflicting with the slides dissolve transition.

my remedy was to dissolve what i needed to dissolve, then duplicate that state to a new slide with immediate advance. THEN do the magic move

i'm beginning to really HATE keynote...

In this same vein, create the text box and use Grab to grab the text. Save it to the desktop, drag and drop it into the "first" slide and the "second" slide, deleting the original text box on the first. Re-size and reposition the object on the second slide and the Magic Move will work as you desire. This method seems to involve fewer steps, but if I think about it probably doesn't. Just be sure that, if you use Preview, to click the "Select" box to copy your object. Otherwise you'll just be copying the text again. In other words, don't just use Cmd-C to copy what you see.

I wrestled with this for a while thinking something was wrong with my build of iWork '09. Now it works as advertised.

Hope this helps; and good luck. Keynote '09 is really neat once you figure out all the possibilities.

--Joe

It might be faster to just copy the text box, open Preview and do New from clipboard, copy that new file from Preview and paste it back on your slide. You'll get a scalable pdf of your text that should work since it's a shape.

The same limitation exists for rotating text.

If the only change to a text box from one slide to another is its rotation, Keynote does move it magically, but the orientation change happens as a sudden jump in the midst of the transition from the box's first orientation to its subsequent one.

Thanks to Brian Peat for sharing the power of Preview! This is a clean and very nice alternative to letting Keynote struggle with the text itself (for now, anyway.)

Blessings!
Dave

Actually, I've reported that rotating bug and there IS a workaround for now. If you assign a background color to the text then set the opacity of that background color to zero, then it'll smoothly rotate from one slide to the next. Hopefully that one will get fixed.

If you haven't done so, I encourage posters to this thread to send feedback to Apple via the Keynote Menu>Provide Keynote Feedback (reference this thread). These forums are User to User, so issues discussed here do not necessarily make their way back to Cupertino.

Using Grab or any other screen grab application will indeed copy the background color behind the text. In some cases that won't matter, but if you have a gradient background color or something more complex than a solid color, it could be an issue. Also, if you have another object behind the grabbed text, the background will also be visible. Instant Alpha can help, but we can detect flaws in text more than in other graphics, so the results may be disappointing.

If you do use the screen grab method, if backgrounds are not a problem, and your text is being scaled up, then use this technique with the text created in Keynote in its largest size, and then copy and paste accordingly across the Magic Move transition. Since you are creating bitmapped images, text will look a bit chunky if scaled up too large, but scaling down will look fine. Keep in mind you can "reverse engineer" a Magic Move (i.e. create an object in the second slide, copy and paste it into the first, scale down, etc.).

Or you can avoid all this work and just created the vector-based text from another app, as I outlined in my previous post. All issues of backgrounds and text scaling are eliminated.

Your solution and the one posted that uses Preview, then, both gives the same or similar results (text converted to a scaleable image) with the advantage going to Preview since it's free, would that be a good read?

(I was only confused about the "Grab" option, I've been using the Preview route myself for awhile!)

If you use "Grab", don't you also grab the background? Fine for a white slide, but for the subtle gradations on the Gradient, Showroom or even the more patterned backgrounds of some of the other themes, not having a transparent background would mess up the look.

Yes, a good read. Actually, Brian's suggestion using Preview is downright brilliant, as it solves all the problems in one fell swoop - and it's faster and free! Didn't know that Preview would see a clipboarded Text Object from Keynote as a transparent PDF... Cool.

Hi,

I have the same problem. I can modify color, and position, as well as rotation, but as soon as I resize the box on the second slide it does not move anymore, it just dissolves.

Phillip

The "Preview Passthru" technique (originally developed by the prolific Ken Drake) is handy in all sorts of situations.