Fixing font size
Hi. We're using "import from elvanto" to manage songs and it's working great. thanks for setting that up. having some issues with font size. When a line is too long it is shrinking font size, sometimes marginally but enough to notice between songs. i've noticed when putting lyrics directly into proclaim a box will appear warning that font size is shrunk... this doesn't seem to happen when importing from elvanto.
Would it be possible to stop font size adjusting or even show what font size is being used when it is being automatically adjusted? Or even allow line wrap as an option?
Comments
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Hello Mike,
Have you tried increasing the size of the lyric text box itself as well? You should be able to select the corners of the text box and drag it out, allowing more room for increased font size or longer lyric lines.
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It's a full size text box. And the point is, how do I know when I need to do something like this? The textbox says text is size 50 but it's not and there's no warning. I have found myself even holding a ruler to the screen to compare songs because I can't tell if my eyes are playing tricks on me re auto-size adjustment.
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We'll take a look into the absence of a warning for you. However Proclaim won't break up lines upon import, as it may confuse people about the original structure of the song.
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Hello,
So we did some testing. You will receive a warning if a particular verse line is too long, and needs to be downsized to fit the width of the text box, but you won't necessarily receive a warning if the font is reformatted because there are too many lines to fit the box vertically.
What you could do is, if you see some of your verses/choruses filling the entire height of the text box, you could break those verse/choruses up so they appear on separate slides.
We'll make note of experience and look into if we can make this behavior more clear to people.
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Thanks. Could i make a suggestion on experience? perhaps any time any text is not rendered as the size selected a little exclamation mark ⚠️ appears to the right of the font selection with a hover over “font rendered smaller than selected size”. The current warning too easily dissapears.
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Justin (Faithlife) said:
We'll make note of experience and look into if we can make this behavior more clear to people.
I think it would improve matters if the Font size box actually showed the minimum size that the font is displayed rather than the size that is aimed for.
And may I remind you that we still have the the rather unsettling effect of the text size actually decreasing at points when the font size is made larger!
tootle pip
Mike
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just noticed that italisizing font makes it bold instead of italics. That is a bit funky.
Font I'm using is Source Serfi Pro.
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Hey Mike,
Thanks for the report. I was able to replicate what you are experiencing. I'll keep digging and report back once we have a fix.0 -
i presume there's been an update. I now get:
(1) a warning box
(2) only the line that's too long is effected... before it appeared font size for all text was effected when it didn't fit.
Thanks
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The warning box stopped showing again and the font size issue is back [:(]
Now if a line is too long the whole song is reduced in size without warning.
What happened?
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Hey Mike,
You aren't seeing the red error message indicating you need to insert a line break?
Have you taken a look at this article here? https://support.proclaimonline.com/hc/en-us/articles/210021963-Why-aren-t-my-song-lyrics-laying-out-right-
Even if you are importing from Elvanto this will stay play a factor.0 -
Correct Re no warning sign.
This was the behaviour I was experiencing when i started this thread: whole song would be reduced in size, sometimes marginally without warning when importing a song from elvanto with a long lyric line.
Then last week i got warning label and only offending line reduced size.
Now back to original behaviour.
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Hey Mike,
We never shipped an update to fix this yet Mike. What you are experiencing is true.
Like Justin said "You will receive a warning if a particular verse line is too long, and needs to be downsized to fit the width of the text box, but you won't necessarily receive a warning if the font is reformatted because there are too many lines to fit the box vertically."
You should be getting a red message saying "One or more lines on this item have been scaled to fit the slide. Add a line break to refine the layout"
It isn't going to really indicate where in the song it is happening, but just give you a message letting you know your song layout needs line breaks. We could do a better job on pin pointing where in the song you need to insert a line break to give a better user experience. Is that something you are looking for?
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I don't get the warning even if it is a line that is too long. I've just run import tests from elvanto with a dummy line that is too long... no vertical formatting issues. And no warning message.
The behaviour seems erratic because I did get this a couple of weeks ago, and my admin colleague and I were delighted. Now we're confused.
I'm not sure if this is just an elvanto bug. We use elvanto to manage all our songs and import from there each week. We really do want a warning message in the way you describe. I'm not as concerned about vertical spacing, or even where the issue is. Just a warning would be good.
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So I think I found the issue. There seems to be a threshold where:
- when line is slightly too long it reduces font size of whole song. no warning of font change
- when line is beyond threshold it reduces only that line and a warning box is shown.
I sort of get why you'd do this... to try and avoid a mismatch in font size between lines... but to change font in the first instance without warning also produces an undesirable - different font size throughout presentation. But my honest opinion is that this is too much smarts and not enough user control
In the following pdf you can see the line gets slightly longer in each pic... font size changes and only at the end (threshold exceeded) does a warning box appear and a single line font size is changed.
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Thanks for the clear example and feedback Mike, we'll bring it up for discussion.
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Hey Justin,
The issue with line size is always coming up in my Teams.
It would be way more intuitiv and user friendly if the text Sizes would be fixed to what is set.
Is this something that is already in work or even considered?
LG
Rubin0 -
Faithlife,
I pulled up this thread with the same thought as Rubin. I asked Faithlife about this a couple years back when we first started using it. I was hoping that Faithlife had come around to recognize that users need the freedom at times, to TURN OFF the auto-scale feature of font sizing??
SHCC
SueAnne0 -
The font size issues folks have shared so far have annoyed me for a long time. For our church, one particular issue is this: we often want to show Chinese and English lyrics on the same slide, for instance two lines of Chines followed by two lines of English. We appreciate that we can actually enter Chinese characters! However, to show big enough characters for the audience to see, we need to up the font size more than what we desire for the English part. It would be really nice if we can select lines (even words) to change font size for, just like in Word or Powerpoint.
Our problem is, if we up the font size to get the desired size for Chinese characters, English font size becomes un-uniform, and short lines get really big. I end up having to take out English lines and insert another text box for them so that I can change the font size for the Chinese box and English box separately. It takes a long time to do that. And you have to do that editing every time for a new song, even though you can save it for the same song after you have done it once.
Senjie
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I don't use Proclaim, but I encounter problems with font size for different languages all the time. I don't know if FL can actually do anything to resolve this issue/these issues, but it would certainly help if they could. When creatiing notes, I usually find myself bumping the Greek text up to 14 pts and the Hebrew up to 18 pts. This is a huge time sink. The need for doing this is driven by legibility concerns, such as you describe with Chinese, where 12 point Chinese is too small while 12 point English is legible. English is a language with both upper case and lower case letters. Hebrew and Chinese are not. When it comes to Hebrew, the problem is that Hebrew fonts are assign point sizes based on equivalence to English LOWER CASE, when Hebrew letters OUGHT to be aligned with English upper case. This is especially needful due to the presence of vowel points that are almost impossible to discern when Hebrew font size is based on English lower case. While it is true that technically Hebrew doesn't "have" upper and lower cases, for PROPER equivalence, Hebrew ought to be perceived as an UPPER CASE script. For some inane and incompetent reason, font designers fail to comprehend the inherent necessity of this equivalence concept and they have based there design output on dubious and impractical principles.
For clarity, I'm saying that what counts as a 12 pt Hebrew font ought to be 4-6 pts larger than what is current. Greek fonts ought to be approx. 2 pts larger. Apparently, Chinese characters ought to some number of points larger as well.
I don't know if there is a font size governing board, but the current practice of equating Hebrew to lower case rather than upper case English constitutes malpractice and ought to be ended. This "industry standard" is simply wrong because it enshrines illegibility. I don't know if FL cares to resolve this problem, but I would like to see them recalibrate the font equivalencies of different languages so that there is a more appropriate consistency of legibility. It's a shame that people have to REPEATEDLY resize non-English language fonts to produce legible text. Not only that, but when a user does increase a foreign language font for the sake of readability, that produces obnoxious line spacing anomolies. I won't bother making specific recommendations, but I do hope FL will seriously consider implementing an in-house recalibration of foreign fonts to address these enshrined legibility inconsistencies.
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There are standards for font size (in pixels) for ergometric considerations; there are standards for the meaning of small/medium/large ... HTML terms. However, the size of font needed is strongly related to one's familiarity with the distinctives of the letters of the alphabet you are reading. It varies from person to person. Beyond that, I know no expert in the field of typography - and I'd defer to such an expert.
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I totally agree with this. This is by far the biggest annoyance with an otherwise great product.
Every time I see that there's a new update for Proclaim I get excited that finally the text editors will finally catch up with the 21st century, but each time I've been disappointed.
It's ironic that this simple text editor I'm using right now to post this comment has far more features and text controls than a presentation program like Proclaim.
Sometimes I want text to be big.
Sometimes I want smaller text in the same box.
Most of the time I don't want it to try and squish the font size to fit it in the box.
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