stream-concern

Make your own crawl template

A crawl template is a whole news crawl look: the band, its lanes, what each lane scrolls and what is pinned at its ends. The three built-in templates are a start; you can also design one from an empty band and share it as a file. Everything here happens in the Crawl designer window, in every app (the egui app and the macOS, Windows and Linux apps).

Open the designer

  • From a crawl layer: select it and press Design… in its Crawl section. The designer edits a copy of the layer’s look; Apply to this layer puts it on the layer.
  • To start a new template: Add ▸ Text ▸ News crawl ▸ New template…, or New template… in the designer. Give it a name. You get an empty band: one lane, nothing in it.

The template list has three groups: Built-in, Your templates (saved from a built-in) and Custom (started empty or imported). Rename, duplicate and delete your own templates from the list; Duplicate works on the built-ins too, as a starting point you can change.

The parts of a band

  • Lanes (1 to 4), top to bottom. Each has a height, a background colour (or a gradient), a speed, a direction and whether it loops. Up and Down reorder them; the gaps between them stay.
  • Elements: what a lane scrolls, repeated: the next item (from typed text or a text file, one per line), a separator (a glyph, dot, bar or diamond), a label, a clock, a logo, a spacer, or a text file’s first line. A lane of items with nothing else just scrolls the items.
  • Pins: elements fixed to the left or right end of a lane: a badge, a headline, a clock, a logo or a free text. They do not scroll; the scrolling text runs between them. A lane with pins and no elements is a still row (a headline bar).

Each element and pin has its own look over the lane’s: font, size, bold, colour, case (UPPER, lower), letter spacing, a shadow of its own (or none), padding, and a background shape (box, pill, slanted box or none) with a fill, a gradient to a second colour, a border and rounded corners. A logo can fit inside a box of a width you set, fill it (cropped) or stretch to it. The clock shows 14:05, 14:05:09, 2:05 PM, 2:05:09 PM, Sat 14:05 or 17 Oct 14:05.

Design on the preview

The preview at the top of the window scrolls as the crawl will.

  • Click an element or a pin to select it; its outline shows in the preview and its settings below.
  • Drag an element along its lane to put it somewhere else in the repeated row; a bar shows where it will land.
  • Drag a pin across the middle of its lane to move it to the other end.
  • Pause holds the preview still (it also holds still while you drag).
  • With the preview focused, ← and → shrink and grow the selected element’s padding by a pixel (with Shift, by ten).

The lists of lanes, elements and pins beside it do the same with the keyboard, for everything you can drag.

A worked example: an evening news band

  1. New template…, named Evening news. The band is empty.
  2. Select Lane 1. Set its height to 80 and its background to a dark blue, with a gradient to a lighter blue, top to bottom.
  3. Add elements: Item, then Separator (choose Dot). Type a few headlines in the lane’s text, or point it at crawl/news.txt in your profile folder.
  4. Add pin ▸ Badge on the Left. Change its text to LIVE, its shape to Pill, its fill to red. Drag it in the preview to the right end and back to see the pin switch sides.
  5. Add pin ▸ Clock on the Right and pick Sat 14:05.
  6. Add lane. Remove its elements, then Add pin ▸ Headline on the left, set its kind to Text file and choose crawl/headline.txt: the lane becomes a headline row that shows the file’s first line and follows it when it changes. Move it Up so it sits above the crawl.
  7. Save. Add the crawl to a scene from Add ▸ Text ▸ News crawl ▸ Evening news, or press Apply to this layer if you opened the designer from a layer.

Share a template

Export… writes the template to a .sc-crawl file. Logos and the band image travel inside the file when they are small (up to 512 KB each, 2 MB in all); a larger one is left out and shows nothing on the other computer.

Import… reads a .sc-crawl file into Custom. Its images go into a crawl-images folder in your profile folder. A text file or image the template names outside your profile folder is left out, so a template from someone else never shows a file from elsewhere on your computer on air.

Notes

  • A crawl you made before templates keeps its look. The first time you open it in the designer, its badge, headline or clock become pins; Apply to this layer keeps that.
  • Up to 32 of your own templates, 12 elements and 4 pins per lane.
  • Deleting a template never changes a layer that uses its look.