Multiple Churches, Multiple Display problems
How can I get OpenLP to place and size text correctly on different displays in different churches?
I prepare OpenLP services on my laptop (sometimes desktop) which are used in 3 different churches with 3 different display resolutions. When I've got slides set up for one display, say 800x600 (old projector!), the text is too small and usually in the wrong place on the background when shown on the next display, 1920x1200 (new UHD screens!)
I've been struggling with this for a long time! So far the only partial solution I've found is to use three different portable instances of OpenLP, each with their own set of customised background themes. The problem with this is that new themes are difficult to co-ordinate across each instance and I can't "proof" new services at home on my own laptop. I never know if the slides are going to show correctly until I get to the church on Sunday!
Does anyone out there share my pain!?
Comments
I share your pain. It can be quite a hassle! Although instead of 3 different instances of OpenLP, I'd use 3 different themes for the different resolutions. I know that isn't a great solution, and doesn't solve the co-ordination across each resolution, but it should save some hassle only having to deal with one instance of OpenLP.
Hmm, hadn't thought of that one, but at least it means there's a common source for all.
Off to do some filing.....!
If you have any ideas on how we could make it work better I can post them on the issue/feature tracker for you. It's a tricky topic as fonts do not scale nicely and different aspect ratios can mess up the output.
An idea I just thought of:
When you make a theme, you specify a fixed screen size/ratio. Then when you display on different size monitors, it scales the whole thing until it fits. This would mean part of a screen would not be used if the width to height ratio is not the same, but at least the theme would be consistent across any screen.
Ninjakiwi,
That's interesting. Do you mean that this could be added to a future release?
My experience has been that themes don't scale properly between displays, and I don't recall seeing options to specify screen sizes, other than to specify X and Y offsets to replace the defaults for the positions of the main display and footers.
If it was possible to scale a theme automatically then it would be a huge improvement!
It's possible of course; But someone would need to code it. I've added a feature request for this here: https://gitlab.com/openlp/openlp/-/issues/828