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The text layer displays the contents of the chosen text file over the top of the other media layers.
Text is displayed in a rectangular window, which by default occupies the whole screen. If position and scale are set to something other than full screen, the result is a text “window” appearing over the media layers. The chosen text is sized to fit this window. If the resulting text overflows the window, it is clipped (but can be scrolled). The text lines parameter controls how much text is shown in the window.
The colour of the window background, and its transparency, can be altered, giving control over the contrast and visibility of the text, when viewed over media.
The Text Layer expects media in the form of .txt files. When adding your own media, only this type of file will be converted. Although text files traditionally use just the ASCII character set, MagicHD can read and display extended characters if they are present in the text file.
The DMX parameters for the layer allow you to control the following features.
Intensity is used to fade the layer into, or out of, the output. As the layer’s intensity reduces, the text will become less visible.
Rotation allows the layer to be rotated around its centre point. The centre point is controlled by Position.
These parameters control the colour of the text background. When the text layer is positioned smaller than full screen, the edges of the text window becomes visible, and you will notice the background colour of the layer.
This parameter controls how transparent the text background is.
To ensure text can be seen over any media, transparency can be set to 0, but this will completely block out what is behind the text window. A more gentle effect is to set the transparency to something between 25% and 50%, giving some contrast for the letters, but allowing the media beneath to show through.
Setting transparency to 255 effectively removes the text background. In this case the choice of text colour is important since it must be visible over the media layers.
| RGB | Background | Transparency | Result |
|---|---|---|---|
0,255,0 | 0,0,255 | 0 |
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255,128,0 | 128,128,0 | 100 |
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255,0,128 | 0,0,0 | 255 |
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These allow the text for the layer to be selected. If either are zero, the layer is switched off.
This parameter allows the text font to be changed. Built in fonts are as follows. User defined fonts are not supported yet.
| Number | Font | Bold | Italic |
|---|---|---|---|
0 | Arial | ||
1 | Arial | X | |
2 | Arial | X | |
3 | Arial | X | X |
4 | Courier | ||
5 | Courier | X | |
6 | Courier | X | |
7 | Courier | X | X |
8 | Times New Roman | ||
9 | Times New Roman | X | |
10 | Times New Roman | X | |
11 | Times New Roman | X | X |
12 | Script | ||
13 | Script | X | |
14 | Script | X | |
15 | Script | X | X |
16 | Georgia | ||
17 | Georgia | X | |
18 | Georgia | X | |
19 | Georgia | X | X |
20 | Impact | ||
21 | Impact | X | |
22 | Impact | X | |
23 | Impact | X | X |
This parameter controls the number of lines of text that are displayed vertically within the text window. With a given position and scale for the layer, increasing the number of lines means the size of the text will reduce so that the required number of lines fit. When set to zero, all the text is displayed.
| Lines | Result |
|---|---|
0 |
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1 |
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3 |
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10 |
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17(*) |
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(*) The text is 13 lines high, but because of the size of the window, and the width of the text, it needs a setting of 17 lines before the full width of the text is visible.
![[Note]](images/icons/note.png){kind=icon} | |
For text with lots of lines, when text lines is set to 0, all the lines are shown and could result in very small font size. |
This parameter controls the direction for scrolling text. Text will only scroll horizontally if it does not fit across the window, or vertically if it does not fit the height of the window. If the direction is set to Char/Line the position of the text can be controlled regardless of its size.
![[Tip]](images/icons/tip.png){kind=icon} | |
For advanced scrolling effects, set Scroll Direction to Char/Line and control the character (X) and line (Y) directly from the console. Make sure scroll time is zero otherwise this will delay the changes. |
This parameter controls the speed of scrolling. For horizontal scrolling the value is characters per second, and vertically, lines per second.
This parameter controls how the text behaves when it is scrolling, and what happens when the text has scrolled to the maximum extent.
When scroll direction is set to Char/Line this parameter selects the character that is displayed in the top left corner of the text window. Note that variable width fonts this will not be precise. The character spacing is based on the average character width over the whole piece of text. The start of the line is character 0. Positive numbers scroll the text to the left and negative numbers scroll the text to the right.
When this parameter changes the text will be scrolled to the new value immediately.
When scroll direction is set to Char/Line this parameter selects the line that is displayed at the top of the text window. The top of the text is line 0. Positive numbers scroll the text up and negative numbers scroll the text down.
When this parameter changes the text will be scrolled to the new value immediately.
This parameter controls how fast the text scrolls when scroll direction is set to Char/Line. The range is from 0 to 10 seconds. Every time scroll char or scroll line changes the scrolling re-starts and will complete after this amount of time.
This parameter controls the width of the border between the edge of the text window and the text itself. The range is 0 to 0.25, and represents the border width as a proportion of overall text window size.
| Border | Result |
|---|---|
0 |
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0.1 |
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0.25 |
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0.25(*) |
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(*) This example shows how the text fades towards the edge of the window if it extends into the border zone. Here the text has been scrolled to a char/line position in the middle of the text.
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