Warning: Garish graphics ahead!

If you’re tired of boring old light-grey-on-dark-grey text, you’l’l be pleased to know that the Maya text widget actually supports a surprising amount of HTML markup. Which means that instead of this:

You set peoples eyeballs on fire like this:

This is a single cmds.text object with it’s label property set to an HTML string.

It turns out that cmds.text is actually a fairly full-featured HTML4 renderer! That means that you can create pretty complex layouts using many — though not all — of the same tools you’d use for laying out a web page. You can style your text with different fonts, sizes, colors, alignments and so on - you can even us CSS style sheets for consistency and flexibility.

More than that you can also include images, tables and layout divisions, which are great for formatting complex information. No more printing out reports into dull old textScrollFields!

Best of all, it’s trivial to do.

All you need to do is set the label property of a cmds.text object to a striing of valid HTML. By default your object inherits the standard maya background and foreground colors but you can override these in your HTML You can even just compose your text in an HTML editor like DreamWeaver or Expression Blend; that how I did the example in the graphic above.

There are some limitations you need to be aware of. The big ones seem to be:

• It looks like text is the only control that supports this styling right now ( tested in Maya 2014).
• HTML/CSS controls for positioning text or divs don’t seem to work. _Align _tags inside a span element do work, but float and positions apparently do not.
• The renderer won’t fetch images or other resources from a URL or relative paths.
• No JavaScripts - so no blinking texts or animated gifs. I’m not sure that’s a loss.
• No inputs such as buttons, checkboxes or text fields.
• Fonts seem to render smaller inside the Maya text than they do in a conventional browser. You can’t specify text size in ems or percentages; pixel sizes seem to work fine, however.

I’d assume that these limitation reflect the behavior of underlying QWidgets inside of Maya - if anybody has the real dope to supplement my guesswork, please chime in.

In the mean time, here’s to the inevitable avalanche of eye-ripping garishness that is sure to result from this revelation. As for me, I’m off to go convert my whole toolset to Comic Sans!