Procaim request for real font size

Our church is considering buying proclaim and since I already use logos, it makes sense. However, there is a deal breaker:

When I set a font size that should be the font size. Currently the "font size" is set by fitting the text to the area of the slide. I would like the option (and I choose if this is default) that if the text, in say a verse, won't fit onto the slide at the set font size it auto chops the text into multiple lines/slides.

Rather then shrinking the text to an unreadable level, forcing me to manually go through and break the lines and break the verses.

This is a deal breaker, because we use lower-thirds to put Bible verses and words of songs and we need to have the option for Proclaim to break up the texts on the lower thirds slides. This option is something that is available on ProPresenter. I would rather continue to use Faithlife because of brand loyalty. But this is the main reason we would get Proclaim, to be able to use lower-thirds live. Right now we prepare all the slides ahead of time and we want to save all that work.

Find more posts tagged with

Comments

Jordan Sjodin

Thanks for the feedback Obed, this is something we are considering.

Today, we don't break within paragraphs for Bible items, but I can see how (especially for lower thirds) you would want it to break them out to fit a reasonable font size without all the extra work! This would even be useful for large scripture readings in general, regardless of lower thirds.

I agree that this is an area we need to address soon!

As for songs, we have intentionally treated them different to preserve their poetic structure, as well as avoid single word wraps, which tend to look bad. So in the case of songs we intentionally have you place the line breaks in their appropriate place, and don't wrap the text. We also break all slides in a song on blank lines.

I'd like to hear your thoughts on songs specifically. Seems to me like a song is easier to manage like this since you set it up once and then reuse it, while bible passages very often and you will be adding them alot.

Also, we have options to do lower thirds for a stream, and full size slides for in-person. Would you make use of that feature or are you only wanting lower thirds?

Mike Binks

Hi Obed

I am a regular complainer about the 'text size' box in proclaim.

I take, and support the strategy that proclaim have adopted in maintaining the poetic structure of songs. With songs the lines should, where possible, conform to the size set by the operator with a warning if some lines have had to be reduced.

The situation with Bible and other text should be different and the size set by the operator honoured and slide breaks, if needed, inserted automatically.

Obed Matus

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/1210572#Comment_1210572

I think that you are correct about the slides for songs, that they should stay how it is. However, with bible passages and other text boxes, there should be an option, that you can choose to make the default, to automatically break the text into slides to be able to keep the chosen size of font.

We might sometimes want to use both lower thirds and full-sized slides in the future, but for the most part, we would only use lower thirds.

You are right, we need this addressed soon. If we have an ETA that is not too distant, we can wait. However, otherwise we will need to go with ProPresenter, although as I mentioned, we really want to stay with Faithlife.

Obed Matus

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/1210572#Comment_1210572

I agree that this is an area we need to address soon!

Jordan, do you have any idea how soon you might address this? We really need this to work and I really want to stay wit Faithlife.

Jordan Sjodin

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/1211072#Comment_1211072

We are still investigating what it would take.
However, I don’t think it will be too hard as Bible passage items already have two slide break options today, the default which is on blank lines and a checkbox option for breaking on paragraphs. (Subtle difference)

So the code already has affordance for multiple types of breaks so shouldn’t be too hard to add another option for “within paragraph”. That option would then maintain the font size and split once we have run out of room.

I’ll take a look in more detail next week and see when we can get it in

Kevin A. Purcell

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/1211117#Comment_1211117

Yes PLEASE! PLEASE! PLEASE! PLEASE! PLEASE! PLEASE!

Obed Matus

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/1211117#Comment_1211117

We are still investigating what it would take.
However, I don’t think it will be too hard as Bible passage items already have two slide break options today, the default which is on blank lines and a checkbox option for breaking on paragraphs. (Subtle difference)

So the code already has affordance for multiple types of breaks so shouldn’t be too hard to add another option for “within paragraph”. That option would then maintain the font size and split once we have run out of room.

I’ll take a look in more detail next week and see when we can get it in

I‘m glad to hear this and encouraged that we might soon be able to get Proclaim.

Anthony Bliss

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/1211117#Comment_1211117

Oh my gosh, I just stumbled upon this request and adding this feature would make my life so much easier. I spend so much time breaking up verses and song lyrics so that they'll be a reasonable size on our screens. If there could even just be a toggle between "fit to slide" or "maintain font size" so that we could have the option to have a set font size, that would be AMAZING!!!

Mike Binks

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/1237777#Comment_1237777

Too true Anthony

For me, having the font size in the setting box match the actual font size on the slide would be a considerable help.

For the life of me I can't work out why any designer would think that the existing arrangement was a good idea?

Carin Basson

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/1210572#Comment_1210572

Hi Jordan.

In relation to the font size scaling in songs, please consider flagging lines that are too long. In order to ensure that all the songs are the same size, I need to manually extend the width of the text box to see if the auto-fit has been triggered, which is enormously frustrating. A toggle to disable auto-fit would be very helpful to see just where the culprit is.

The Town Tech

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/1238398#Comment_1238398

So I understand the philosophy that Proclaim developers came up with early on regarding prioritizing not breaking up lines. It makes sense from an aesthetic point of view and maybe even from a readability point of view. However, it isn't a perfect solution because if you go from slide to slide and the font size changes dramatically that's not very aesthetically pleasing either. And the current solution is to tell people to manually insert line breaks so that the font size is roughly the same from slide to slide (although there's no way to even know if it is).

I think what people are asking for is essentially a solution that is better than either the current solution OR the assumed alternative where lines would just randomly wrap. What people want is the ability to have a block of text and say "use font size X and make as many slides as necessary so that there's no weird wrapping AND the font size stays consistent". I'm not sure why this wouldn't be something you'd want to offer when competitors use it and people rave about it. It can even be a toggle with options "maintain font size" or "maintain formatting". If it's the latter you do it like you do now and auto size the font. If it's the former you take each "paragraph" of text in a song and automatically make as many slides as necessary to fit with the selected font size.

For us, during the Christmas season we put up these "windows" that are rear projection screens where we use motion backgrounds to make them look like real windows. It's a really neat thing that makes Christmas feel extra special. Because this center window is way smaller than our normal screen we end up spending a ton of time having to reformat every song we do with extra line breaks to make this work. Instead of a verse being 1 slide it ends up being 3 or 4 because if we left it 1 slide the font would be so small no one could read it.

I know this is kind of unique where we basically have two setups (Christmas and non-Christmas), but everyone has to deal with this at least once. You import a song and the first thing you have to do is reformat it for your church when it would be awesome if the software could just do some math and do it for you. It would save everyone so much time.