Graphics

Related to my earlier topic regarding scripting logic to place text within panels, depending upon if they are one- or two-line bullets:

I have several templates that are basically text bullet holders (think PowerPoint). The issue is that the actual text needed for show titles (as opposed to the dummy text used in the templates) wildly varies in word length, per bullet. Some bullets have 4 words, some have two full lines of many words.

I'm struggling with the most efficient way to flesh out 100+ pages with text of all sorts. For the short, few-worded bullets, I want them to be one line, centered in my BG panel. For the two-line bullets, I need them be up a little higher to still fit within the same sized BG panel, and the font size needs to be smaller. I also seem to have to keep making adjustments on the word-wrap size.

Should I just duplicate each of my templates twice, to include a small, med and large font?

Or is there a better way? Thanks for any help.

sf

One way that I've seen some customers do this is to add some hidden text fields to the scene which then get published to the sequencer. They would publish one field called "Number of Bullets" and from the sequencer side you would enter either 1,2,3,4,etc into that field. That field would then be used to feed into a script which could make adjustments to the scene. For example it would hide or make visible all of the bullet quads. It could also adjust the positioning of a group object to keep the bullets centered vertically based on how many there are.

I think another text field could be published called Font Size, which you could then feed into the script to adjust which font is assigned to the text objects..

It would take some experimentation to get it to work exactly like you want, but once it is set up it would be all in one template and it would be easy to change a scene from 1 bullet to 2 if you needed it..

Maybe someone already has an example; if not I'll see if we can make one up to be used as a starting point.

#XPression

Here is an example of what I meant. Its pretty bare bones right now but it shows how the scripting can be used..

I could not get it to work with word wrap however..

http://ross.brickftp.com/f/03b6be84f

In hindsight, it doesn't even need the "Number of Bullets" field, because the script could just count how many lines of text have data in them...

Oh, and in Version 5.5 the new Visual Logic makes this stuff a whole lot easier: http://www.rossvideo.com/graphics-system/xpression/xpression-u/video-tutorial-202.html

#XPression