Preview Text

Vision models are only useful if you can actually see what they said. Preview Text is the plain, no-frills node for that: you hand it a string, it shows it on the canvas. It exists in ShmuelRonen's ComfyUI Pixtral Large Extension specifically to catch what comes back from the pack's Pixtral Large node, but there's nothing Pixtral-specific about it - it'll display any STRING you wire into it.

The pack itself wraps Mistral AI's Pixtral Large vision model, and it's a smaller side project from an author better known for ComfyUI-LatentSyncWrapper, a lip-sync wrapper with real traction in the community (a workflow post using it pulled 238 upvotes on r/comfyui). This node is the least fussy of the three in the pack - it doesn't call any API, doesn't need a key, doesn't touch the network. It's plumbing.

What it does and where it sits in the graph

The pack's typical flow is Load Image → Pixtral Large → Preview Text. Pixtral Large sends your image(s) and prompt off to Mistral's API and gets back a text answer - a description, an OCR transcription, an answer to whatever you asked. Without something to display that text, you'd have no way to read the result short of digging into ComfyUI's console output. Preview Text renders it right there on the node, in the graph, next to everything else.

It's the same role Preview Image plays for pictures, just for strings. And because Pixtral Large's whole pitch is strong multilingual support - the README specifically calls out Hebrew, Arabic, Chinese, Japanese, Korean and more, including OCR in those scripts - Preview Text is built to handle right-to-left text and full Unicode cleanly rather than mangling it, which is a real and easy-to-hit failure mode for text widgets that assume left-to-right Latin script.

Inputs and outputs that matter

There's exactly one input and it's the whole node:

• text (STRING, required) - whatever you want displayed. Normally this comes straight off Pixtral Large's output, but you can feed it any string source to sanity-check text mid-graph.

The output mirrors the input as a STRING (returned as a list under the hood), so you're not stuck at a dead end - you can chain the displayed text into something else downstream, like a text file save node or another prompt input, without needing a separate pass-through node. It's also marked as an output node internally, which is the same mechanism ComfyUI uses for Save Image and Preview Image: it tells the graph "this branch has a visible endpoint," so it actually runs even if nothing downstream consumes its output.

How to install it

Search "ComfyUI Pixtral Large Extension" in ComfyUI Manager, or clone it directly:

cd ComfyUI/custom_nodes
git clone https://github.com/ShmuelRonen/ComfyUI_pixtral_large.git

Restart ComfyUI. Nothing to download, no dependencies specific to this node - it's the simplest of the three by a wide margin.

Common issues & troubleshooting

The README lists two failure modes, and both are edge cases rather than everyday problems:

• "Unicode decode error" - something upstream produced text in an encoding the node can't read cleanly. This is more likely if you're piping text through an intermediate node that isn't Unicode-safe rather than straight from Pixtral Large, which returns clean UTF-8.
• "Display buffer full" - you're trying to show an unusually large chunk of text at once. If you cranked maximum_tokens way up on the Pixtral Large node for a long document transcription, the response can get big enough that display, not analysis, becomes the bottleneck. Trimming maximum_tokens or splitting the job into smaller Pixtral Large calls sidesteps it.

Outside of those, if the node shows nothing at all, the almost-always answer is that the wire isn't actually connected to Pixtral Large's output, or Pixtral Large itself errored out upstream - check that node's own output before assuming Preview Text is broken. It's a display node; it can't show you an error that happened before it.