Unable to paste large amount of text into work path CS6

[Rheves]

I am trying to make a similar design for myself as seen on this site: http://postertext.com/ and am running into some trouble in CS6. I first select the layer that I would like to overlay with text, right click to make a work path, switch to text and click within the area so that the text sticks within the work path. From here if I paste in too much Photoshop waits for a few seconds while it processes, and then ....nothing. I've been reducing the text that I paste in little by little and once I hit some magic threshold it will work but that is becoming a major pain in the ass and now I have hit a point where I need to get more text in there but am simply unable to.

Has anyone come across this before? Is this a real bug or is there something else I should be doing?

I also think there may be a better way to do this but I simply don't know how, in my last revision I removed parts of the image for highlighting, hoping to have a lack of text in some parts. But when I created the work path it ignored these unselected areas and just make a path around everything. Like making a work path from a donut and having it fill in the hole in the middle. Is there a different better way I should be doing that?

Thanks for the help!

 

[Tom Mann]

I've been able to paste quite large amounts of text in documents with no problems, e.g., https://www.photoshopgurus.com/foru...rop-acr-ps11a_tjm_alternate-01_698px_crop-jpg , so my first guess is that you are approaching some memory limit, hence some questions:

1. How much RAM is in your computer?

2. What OS are u using (particularly, 32 or 64 bit)?

3. If you have a 64 bit OS, are you using the 32 or 64 bit version of PS?

4. Have you checked to see if the text limit that you are encountering shrinks if you have another large document open? Have you tried shutting down all other programs and see if the limit increases?

5. What is the size of the document in number of horiz and vertical pixels (aka, pixel dimensions)?

6. Roughly how much text are you trying to fit in? 1000 characters? 10,000 characters, etc?

7. What are the stats on the document that are displayed in the little box in the lower LH corner of the PS screen (see attached screen shot), particularly size of the document (as shown), and the amount of memory used (aka, scratch size)?

Tom M

 

[Tom Mann]

BTW, if we determine that it really is some sort of limit that would require some major upgrade to your computer or software, there are possible work-arounds.

For example, although it goes against common recommendations about rasterized vs vector layers, you can try this: Once you've got the overall look of the document the way you want, enter small sections of the text (ie, as small as your installation of PS can handle), rasterizing and flattening each of these sections as you go, each onto their own layers (with layer fx and transparent backgrounds). If you have lots and lots of characters (ie, vector objects), it's quite possible that a few more sparsely populated rasterized layers may be tolerated better than huge number of vectors (ie, each character), especially if you can merge many of the other layers.

HTH,

Tom M

 

[Rheves]

I have 8GB Ram on this computer.
Windows 8 64 bit.
64-bit Photoshop.
I have all other programs closed as working with the text once it was in there was quite slow. Opening another large document didn't seem to slow down the process at all and I could paste the same amount of text in. Notably though, I tried copying the text I was working with previously (38,000 chars) and was not able to paste that in to a new layer made through the same process as the original.
38,000 chars right now.
Document dimensions are 15.05cm x 22.86cm
Pixel dimensions 1778 x 2700.
Scratch is 722.9M/3.89G

 

[Tom Mann]

Hi Rheves - Thanks for the info. I tried to reproduce your problem on my system, and, couldn't really do so. For the record, my system is Win 8.1 (64 bit), 64 GB of RAM, fast i7, 64 bit PS CC 2015. Unfortunately, I don't have CS6 installed on this system, so I couldn't check if there is any difference between it and CC 2015.

Here is the testing procedure I used: First, using http://www.lipsum.com/feed/html , I generated large blocks of "Lorem Ipsum" plain text, each of which was slightly larger than the following size: 111 paragraphs, 10k words, 67k characters (ie, 1 byte = 1 character). Each block of text was slightly larger than this value because I duplicated the last three summary lines several times to be able to easily identify each block of text once it was pasted into PS. From there, I cut and pasted it into Ultra Edit, a text editor, to be sure only conventional ASCII characters were present, and double check the word and character count. (All was fine, this step turned out not to be necessary).

Next, I opened a new 5000 (h) x 9000 (v) pixel, 8bpc, blank document, drew a text box that occupied most of the PS document, and pasted the text into the text box a few times until it nearly filled up. Each pasting operation took about 3 or 4 seconds to complete and went without a glitch.

Three copies of the above text just about filled it up the PS document. This is slightly more than 30,000 words or ~200,000 characters (incl. spaces, paragraph returns, etc.), ie, several times than the limit you encountered.

The only way I could induce a problem in pasting text into PS was if the size of my PS document was so small that the pasted text wound up being under 3 or 4 points in size, ie each character being about the same number of pixels high. In this case, PS simply truncated the text, but never hung.

It occurred to me that you might be trying to put that much text into such a small document as some sort of graphic feature, and hence not put have any spaces or paragraph returns in your text, so I tested this by stripping out all spaces between words, and all paragraph returns in the main body of each chunk of text, leaving only the final paragraph return(s) present. This indeed caused a problem. I didn't explore either of the above situations in any detail, but just noted that they are problematic.

HTH,

Tom M

 

[Rheves]

Hi Tom, I recreated your test and saw no error myself either.

You said that you saw a problem when you with both small text size and removing paragraph returns. Heh, I am doing both, using 1.5pt text size and removing paragraph returns but not spaces between words, I've attached a screenshot this time of my canvas.

I should say too that my PS never hangs, when I try to paste the text in, nothing happens after the processing but I am free to continue using it.

 

[MrToM]

I tried this in CS6 on a Win7 x64 machine with 8GB RAM and a really naff GFX card.

Text used was 200000 characters to fill the entire page.....@1.5pt and 1778px, 38000 was just no where near enough.....only about 1/6 the page.



Even so, I had no trouble pasting a full page of text.

So.....may I suggest a different approach to your workflow?

Instead of conforming the text to a path you can fill the entire page with text and use the path to mask out what you do not want...

Assuming you have these layers: [in order]



FULL PAGE OF TEXT
WHITE BG
IMAGE

You would also have your 'path' visible.

With the 'text' layer selected use LAYER > VECTOR MASK > CURRENT PATH

Job done.

You can still edit the path if you need to tweak it.

You don't get quite the same effect as the words are literally 'masked' instead of conforming to the shape but with an image this small you are hardly going to notice.

I'll include the PSD file I used for testing....see if you can open it OK.
View attachment pasting_text_MT_01.zip

Regards.
MrToM.