Text Preview in Editor

[PlatformKing]

Sorry if this has been mentioned before development team. Something that would be really useful and a big time saver would be a preview window showing how the words will look as they are currently formatted in the database editing window. At the moment I have to load each song and then look through each verse to see if the words are spilling over onto a new line due to the margin settings etc.

If this isn't possible then maybe a margin line in the text editor to indicate how wide the screen is currently set to that would move left or right depending on where the margins are set and the size of text.

[Christian]

Hi Platform King (great alias BTW!)

If I understand you correctly then you may find that you're issue is solved in the next version. We have implemented an improved 'current song' window for v2.5 which draws a horizontal separator line where there will be a screen break. This makes it easy to see at a glance whether there are any small adjustments that you might want to make due to text spilling over onto another screen which is not the desired effect.

I hope that makes sense - hopefully we'll have a release ready for the end of next month.

Thanks,
Christian.

[PlatformKing]

Hey Christian, sorry I wasn't very clear last time. What I was trying to get at (and wish I had a picture I could draw to show it!) is the idea of having a preview window in the text editor showing how text will look on the page as it's entered. The problem of overspill isn't so much a problem cos we go for the system of rarely having more than 4 or 5 lines of text on the screen at a time.

The problem arises when the line of text is too long to fit as I'd like it to so you get an awkward looking overspill onto the next line which has to looked at then corrected. I mean, it isn't a really time consuming thing but it would make this programme absolutely mint! I know EasyWorship has a feature like this but I don't know how difficult it would be to implement. I am the creative person on our A/V team rather than the technical one!

Cheers and blessings
Platformking

PS the name comes from my days playing Pitfall 2000 and saying my brother was rubbish (he's 32) so I took and promptly died by falling down a hole! "Platfom King" was the taunt from my brother, so the name stuck and it appears in all games I play and anywhere for that matter.

[Christian]

OK PK - thanks for the clarification I think I understand now...!

I think what you're saying is that the 'auto word-wrapping' feature is not helpful to you in the way you want to use ZionWorx. If you've used Easy Worship before then I can understand your way of thinking, because in a similar way to using PowerPoint, with EasyWorship you prepare the song as a 'set of slides', and you are concerned with formatting at the same time as you're entering the song words. Correct? Please correct me if I'm wrong....

But ZionWorx takes a fundamentally different approach here. With ZionWorx the idea is that you enter your song data as you would read it in a book, line by line, with a line break at the end of a line, and a blank line separating each verse/chorus. The format of the song text in the database editor should have no dependence on how the song will look when it's actually on the screen...

The reason for this is simple: it offers maximum flexibility in presentation. The display engine in ZionWorx dynamically works out how the text should be positioned and word-wrapped according to a number of 'style' properties which include font type, size, alignment, custom image margins etc. If you change any of these properties, then all the word-wrapping will be recalculated immediately.

So, with this in mind, a preview of how the song text will look when it's on the screen is not possible at the time when you're adding a song to the database - because there's no 'style' defined at that point in time (unlike EasyWorship). I hope this is making sense!

Maybe we could develop some other kind of feature to make selection of the font size more automatic, to avoid word-wrapping? But then is word-wrapping really the issue for you? Anyway, I hope some of this info is helpful...

Cheers,
Christian.

[PlatformKing]

Yeah, basically I often get something like this:

I put the text into the editor looking like this...

For He is good, He is faithful, He is kind
He is patient, He is loving, He is wise

But after clicking OK, I end up with this...

For He is good, He is
faithful, He is kind
He is patient, He is
loving, He is wise

or at least something like that. So if there is a way to see where the line ends in terms of space on the screen then that is way to avoid the dodgy word wrap!

[ChrisClark]

There is no way of showing where the line ends until you load the song into the current song section (Note that the current song will show how the lines will wrap also - before being shown on the projector screen). As Christian said there are two many variables in determining how a line is displayed - font, background margins, style... - to be able to preview these when a song is entered.

I've seen other programs that behave as Christian described - you tell the presenter how much text you want to show on screen and the font - and it will work out a size. This could be implemented as an option in ZionWorx (and may be necessary in the future anyway for bible text) - but comes with it's own problems too such as the font getting too small to read from a distance

Is the issue you have about where the line is breaking rather then the line breaking per se? Another possibility is to allow the user to change where a song breaks the line in the current song - ie be able to edit the text of a song as it is live (this probably shouldn't affect the actual stored song though). This would be good also for where a spelling error is spotted in a worship service - all too common occurrence with us

[Christian]

Sorry guys, just had to comment on the song lyrics that PK quoted!

I LOVE that song

If anyone else hasn't heard of the band 'One Hundred Hours' then go and check them out... The song is called 'He Is Good' and it really gets stuck in your head. We've been playing it loads in our youth band at church and it really ROCKS!

See ya,
Christian.

[pbc_avcontroller]

Would it not be possible to add a 'preview' button so that while entering the text in the 'ADD DIALOG BOX' you coulde press PREVIEW and move the ADD DIALOG BOX to one side and assess how the layout is looking -- just a thought, if I'm off track I apologise.

Regards

Ewan
<i>'Inch by Inch, anything is a cinch!</i>

[Christian]

Hi Ewan,

Unfortunately, a preview feature would have the same fundamental probelm as I described above - because there is no style defined e.g. font size etc, then it's impossible to preview what the text would look like on the screen.

As Chris suggested, the only way to approach this I think is to provide an automatic font size selection feature. So the 'preview' feature you're suggesting would then use the lagest font size possible without doing any word-wrapping. We could add a feature like that - but then what about background images and custom margins? As soon as you change one of these variables, then the preview feature would become useless anyway!

I hope that make sense...

Cheers,
Christian.