First off, let’s start with a definition of the word “Hack”. Contrary to the popular connotation, the term “hack” really means something along the lines of “make something work the way you want and or need it to.” Keep that definition in mind as you read this post.
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As some of you may know, I had the opportunity to run projection at a conference this past weekend. It was quite the exciting venture- I run projection at our church about 4 out of 5 Sundays, but I’d never before been the primary operator at a large-scale conference. Needless to say, it was a very fun experience. Thankfully, there were no errors either- but that’s not to say they didn’t try to appear.
At our church, we use the software EasyWorship for projecting our lyrics and sermon notes. It’s a great piece of software, though it does have its quirks (Can you tell I want support for .png?). However, one of the hardest things to combat is EasyWorship’s auto-resizing text feature. I know there’s an option in the preferences, but I’ve never found it to work in the way I want. As I had received instruction from my pastor saying that we wanted everything to be as distraction-free as possible, I set about my mission: hacking EasyWorship.
The sheer simplicity of the hack makes it very easy to implement. That is, provided you have the right font. Font?! I thought this was a hack, not a font change! Oh, but it is- and the hack is provided in the font.
Here’s the dilemma: We had one song that had very short lines in the lyrics. EasyWorship likes to fill the screen with as much text as possible, so it goes about that by blowing the text up to a huge size. However, since our screen was on the ground, this would not be a helpful thing- I find that the really tall people tend to sit in the front. This prevents other people from seeing words that are not at the very top the screen. So that’s one reason not to use a large font size- you won’t be able to see part of the verse from the back.
The second reason goes along with the distraction-free memo mentioned above- the very next song had really long lines. To make sure that the entire line was displayed on, well, one line, EasyWorship did some more auto-resizing- this time, the text was very small. However, this size also made the text all appear at the top of the screen; exactly what I wanted it to do. And the text was still very readable- this song was good to go. The next step was to make the other song follow this pattern.
I returned to the previous song. The huge text stood there, grinning in what appeared to be apparent victory. In the past, I’d been able to bump text up to the top by making a new verse and filling it with gibberish until the song was moved to the place I wanted it. I would then make that gibberish a black color, preventing it from showing up if the slide was accidentally projected. Unfortunately, this solution would not work at the conference- we were using a textured green background. EasyWorship does not support transparencies in text coloring- but even if it did, an outline would still appear around the letters. A new solution must be found. And find it I did- in a cheap, downloaded font.
NeoTech to the rescue!
NeoTech is a free font I encountered through the world of iPhone theming. A nice looking face, I had downloaded it to create some graphics for my iPhone. Sadly, I found it would not work for all that I needed it to- it did not support characters other than the alphabet, numbers, and the period and comma. Oh well- it was a cool font anyway. I kept it around.
Therein was my solution found.
When you have a font that does not support a certain character, you are usually presented with one of two errors- you either get a rectangular box, or else you get nothing at all. NeoTech displayed the latter of the two- an apostrophe typed in the font did not register as anything at all. But EasyWorship saw any character typed as a character- whether it could be displayed or not. And if you stack enough invisible characters… you can dictate the size of the text for the rest of the song. Here was my solution.
I typed up all the songs in Myriad Pro font. It displayed nicely and was a very clean font overall. If a song’s text was too big, I employed the hack. I created a new slide, put an apostrophe on one line, hit return, and repeated the process until there was usually a list of about 8 apostrophes or the song’s text had shrunk to the size I wanted. Myriad Pro was happy enough to display these apostrophes, should I want it to. But NeoTech would throw up the denial flag. I highlighted this dummy slide, and changed the font to NeoTech. Instantly, all the apostrophes disappeared from the preview. I had won.
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So there you have it. It was a beautiful hack- you’d never guess there was any hacking involved unless you were in on the story. Which you now are. I myself fully intend to use this hack whenever necessary.
Mike
March 2, 2010 at 19:42
Rock rock on. That’s pretty smart!
Laedelas
March 2, 2010 at 20:50
Dude! I’ve been reading black gibberish during worship all this time?!
Josh
March 2, 2010 at 21:16
Well, not all the time. It tends to weird the other operators out a bit, as they don’t know that it will be invisible.
Theodoor
March 19, 2010 at 11:49
Well, this is a good method.
But I think this is a bit cumbersome.
You have to change the font size in your background settings to 6%. (or 5%, 7%, just what you want)
You can also change this in the global font settings of EasyWorship.
Josh
March 19, 2010 at 11:54
You know, I’ve tried that- but it never works the way I want it to. Some things I do want displayed at a larger font, some I want smaller. Thus my method.
daniel
September 22, 2010 at 07:39
i want to download
Alvin
November 7, 2010 at 18:44
Josh.
I understand your pastor not wanting anything distracting on his screens and totally agree with him.
Well,it seems to me that you might not really know how to use the software to the best. It seems to me that you are creating a lot of unnessary work for yourself and maybe a lot of frustrations for others who can’t see the blank characters and don’t know they are there.
Within a song, EW will look at the blocks of words and set a font size that will fit all the text of the LARGEST block of words for that song within that text box. If then, you have a block of words – say at the end of the song , with only two lines, the font size of those two lines will be exactly the same as it is for the larger block of words. The font size will not change during the song. Now if you then use s song that has only two or three lines of text in the same size text box, the text for that song will be larger that for the previous song.
Believe me, I have been using this software now for about 8 years both in my church and at large conventions. The last thing I want is distracting text or screen content on my projection screens. During the conventions I use it to the max with live video, text (songs, Titles, notes/comments and scriptures) over live video, songs on both still and moving backgrounds interspersed with PowerPoints as required plus DVD and video clips of all file types. At many of the conventions I have done the computer work for, the screen has also been very low. This means I need to place the text in the top quarter of the screen or the audience at the back can’t see the lower text. This was a real pain as I could only have about two lines of text at a suitable size on screen at any time. I had to keep on my toes, changing the words to keep up with the osng. It seems you may be using the default text box which fills the screen horizontally and vertically. We have now addressed that with the twin screens being higher.
You can – and should – set your text box size to suit your background. Always place your text in a “non busy” part of your background. This makes the text easier for the audience to read rather than having lots of colours, lines or whatever behind the text – which can be very distracting . EW has a default text box size that if used as standard is way too large with the text “in your face” on the big screen – unless you have an extremely large venue but then you should also have larger screens to suit the venue. You can change the size and positioning of that default text box also. Don’t allow the text to just cover the whole background picture. That looks horrible and is very distracting and hard to read.
Now, with a smaller text box on your screen the font size will be also smaller – particualrly if you have large blocks of words. In the song editor, break the verses into smaller blocks of about four lines per block. Within a song there are usually natural places you can break the text without upsetting the flow through the song.
Once you do this, you will have text pretty much the same size all the way through your service. You will only get larger text if you have a song that has say just two lines of text in each verse. In this case, you need to make your text box smaller for that song.
Doing this is much easier that trying to insert a heap of blank characters – which may just come back to bite you if someone does some editing of the song at a later date! You can do a “once off” edit of you edit the song from the schedule. You get the option of selecting a background, text box size, font position within that text box, font style and colour. When the edit is closed those changes are only for the song in the schedule, they do not get saved into the main database.
When placing words in something like PowerPoint, you spend hours sizing text boxes and fitting words where you want them. EW does it all for you. If you had a large block of text in PP, you also would need to reduce your font size to make it fit – or do what I have mentioned and break it into smaller blocks of text. You also have to realise that too much text on a screen at one time is also distracting and harder to read than a smaller amount of text. You also don’t want only one or two lines of text as that means hard work for you chnaging it very frequently. Also the singers – and audience like to be able to see ahead, what the words are. I find about 4-5 lines works good and all the songs in my datatbase are broken into blocks of 4-5 lines. I can then use pretty much any background with a preset text box (yes all my backgrounds have preset text boxes assigned to them so the text goes where I want it too on that particular background) and the text on screen is pretty much the same for all songs, all the time.
If you have cut-n-pasted text from Word, into your EW song, you may find that you have also picked up a lot of the Word formatting characters which are invisible or may dispaly as some sort of code. Your entire song comes in on one Ew slide and the text is very tiny! This can be quite a pain to get looking right on screen if this happens and you need to delete all of those characters before you can format the song properly in EW. Dropping the song into Notepad or Wordpad can get rid of most – if not all of the invisible ones. Some of the visible ones mnay still be there though.
Alvin
David
November 17, 2010 at 14:59
Bought easyworship back in 2006, and the 2007upgrade was fine but Id not even venture to the latest updates or even consider easyworship now. I sympathise with new purchasers. Sounds to me easyworship has become to restricting in there pursue of tighter secrurity.and have made bad choices when it come to ease of use for customers. Too bad! Maybe they should have a name change. I have been seeing posts complaining about transferring data bases and not being able to use them on more than one computer at the same time….Wow..Not cool..I’d try going back to the earlier versions…Never had a issue with size of text and being able to choose your text or colour of font and I noticed a change were they had options that they don’t have now. Maybe tell easyworship about your concerns, for me the older the better in our case….ty..
Josh
December 1, 2010 at 13:44
Hey, thanks for the comment. For me, I don’t find easy worship to be too secure for ease of use; much of it simply feels outdated. I’ve transfered databases plenty of times without any problems. It seems to me that there are some things that they claim will work, but not without some funny actions first. Example: .mp4. For whatever reason, even in the latest version, you still need to hack the registry and install some codec packages. Lame. And no .png support is just pathetic; I’d like to know why they can’t use that image structure, as it’s really pretty darn common.
And don’t get me started on the GUI…
billp
January 2, 2011 at 05:50
Another way to get control of line positioning in EasyWorship is to make use of Shift-Enter. This is just like using Enter, alone, but Shift-Enter keeps the next line on the same screen/page. Use this to have a consistent type size on each page: choose, say, 10 lines per screen and put the first two lines in as usual, then follow that by Shift-Enter 7 more times. The extra blank lines makes the autosize feature always think there are 10 lines and scales the text accordingly. Then add one last Enter (by itself) to start the next page. I use this method to have text in the top, middle, or bottom of the screen.
Tim
August 30, 2011 at 10:40
Seems like a lot of work when you can just resize the text box to get the size font that you want.
Kevin
November 18, 2011 at 18:13
you should buy propresenter!!!!
Pete
November 28, 2011 at 11:41
We too are frustrated to no end with the autosize feature of Easy Worship. What was the programmer thinking??!!
And guess what… We already know to resize the text box and to use Shift-Enter and to arbitrarily set the font size for some words large while making other text small [for parenthetical expressions, such as (repeat 2x)]. We have been doing those things for years – but we still have frustrations.
Frankly, I have no problem making stuff fit in PowerPoint. I don’t need or want autosize. I just want the song text to be the size I choose.
Ok, is Propresenter really the answer?? Does it support three video displays (Control, Presentation, Stage Monitor)? Does it support DVD playback and Flash videos and MOV, etc.? I am asking because I don’t know… And I am also furiated that Easy Worship has crashed & burned four times so far this year during the Worship service, which is incredibly disruptive. (It freezes when you play a video, or suddenly swaps the presentation screen with another one.) Once when it froze it corrupted Windows and the PC would no longer reboot.