Working with Text in Apple Motion; am I understanding Anchor Points correctly?
TL;DR
Below, you will see where I carefully went through and troubleshot the daylights out of how Apple's Motion creates anchor points for text, because... I really have no idea how to work with alignment when it comes to Motion. If you are a saint, you can read all that I've written below, but really, I just want to know this...
Question: If you create a single line of text, how can you precisely move the anchor point to the dead center of the text box? By default, the anchor point appears at the bottom left. I need X/Y to be 0, and that be dead center of the text.
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ANCHOR POINTS WHEN CREATING TEXT
It seems to me that there are four ways to create text in Apple Motion... and ALL FOUR methods place the "Anchor Point" in a wildly different place.
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1.) Unconstrained Text Box
- Enable the Text tool (T).
- Click anywhere within the canvas.
- Type whatever text you'd like to add.
Anchor Point: On the Properties tab, the anchor point is created with X = 0 and Y = 0 placing the anchor point at the bottom-left corner of the text. **Note: This refers to the bottom-left of the first text character, not of the Text Box that appears around the text.
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2.) Constrained Text Box
- Enable the Text tool (T).
- Click and drag a text box to the exact Height and Width you'd like to contain the text.
- You can begin adding text, or you can simply deselect the text box you've created to add text later.
Anchor Points: The anchor point is created in the center of the text box. The X and Y values vary depending on the dimensions of the text box you create, but if you reset them to X = 0 and Y = 0, the anchor point is now in the top-left corner of the text box. **Note: Unlike the previous method, the anchor point is really at the top-left most corner of the actual text box, i.e. not the top-left of the first character.
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3.) Resized Constrained Text Box
- Enable the Text tool (T).
- Click and drag a text box to the exact Height and Width you'd like to contain the text.
- Release the text box, but before you begin typing, click and drag one of the dimension nodes around the Text box and change the size of the text box.
Anchor Points: If you do this... the anchor point appears on the Properties tab with some values. However, the actual it is not in the center, nor in any corner, top-left or bottom-left., I imagine it is the center of the original text box before you resized it... but that it just a guess.
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4.) Unconstrained Text Box with Hard Returns
- Enable the Text tool (T).
- Click anywhere within the canvas.
- Type whatever text you'd like to add.
- At some point, while typing, press the return key to drop to the next line. This may be a common practice to constrain the text box's width, without predefining it by clicking and dragging.
Anchor Point: With this method, the anchor point appears at the bottom-left of the the first character. So, it's the bottom left of the character which appears in the TOP-left of the text box.
I have to be honest. I work for a software company, so I have filed hundreds of work items (change requests) for bugs... and I am literally gobsmacked by how Beta-version Apple Motion is. This bit with the anchor points is only the tip of a gargantuan iceberg of "What in the Actual ****" issues I see within Motion. I realize that Motion is quite literally the smallest source of revenue for Apple, but... if you look at ANY data on children, the absolute #1 career that every child in the whole world wants to have now is... "YouTuber."
Digital media for so-called "Content Creation" is hotter now than it ever has been in history. Every child in the universe (and many adults as well) are all looking into... Motion, After Effects, DiVinci... blah blah... and right now... Apple's Motion feels like a product that has NO Product Manager. And while Apple's shares will likely not plummet because of it... I must confess... it lowers my opinion of the whole company that they are not more embarrassed by this product.
