Use this dialog to create your text objects. The dialog consists of three pages.
The first page contains the text editor, a toolbar, and a status line which explains the toolbar functions if the mouse is over a toolbar icon. Additionally, there is an info bar which shows the currently selected font face as well as the font size and the alignment. Possible alignments are: left, right, center, and justified.
In the text editor you can enter the text of your object. You can also import this text from an external file by clicking on the folder icon in the toolbar. Additionally, you can save the contents of the text editor if you click on the disk icon.
The toolbar offers the following functions (from left to right):
On this page you can choose a font for this text object. You will normally do this using the font requester button in the toolbar on the first page, but if you want to use one of Hollywood Designer's inbuilt fonts, you have to configure this font here because it does not appear in the font requester. You can also manually enter font name and font size on this page. This is useful if you are using the platform-independent font renderer which allows you to use fonts that are not actually installed in the operating system. Thus, they will not show up in the font requester. So if you want to use these fonts through the platform independent font renderer, you have to manually enter the font name and font size here, and of course you must activate platform-independent text in the Project properties dialog.
The default fonts of Hollywood Designer are Inbuilt Sans, Inbuilt Serif, Inbuilt Monospace, Inbuilt DejaVu Sans, Inbuilt DejaVu Serif, and Inbuilt DejaVu Monospace. The advantage of these fonts is that they are inbuilt into Hollywood Designer and thus they are available on every system. By using these fonts you also do not have to worry about any licensing fee issues because these fonts can be used without any royalty obligations and they will look the same on all platforms. Note that the DejaVu fonts aren't inbuilt in Hollywood so you need to enable the "Link all fonts to program" option if you plan to distribute your project with the fonts included. The DejaVu fonts differ from the standard fonts in the way that they have some more characters, especially non-ISO-8859-1 ones so they can be useful when it comes to Eastern European characters and so on.
The "Font engine" widget allows you to set the font engine that should be used to load the font. This is only possible if you don't use one of the inbuilt fonts (see above). Thus, the font engine widget will only be accessible if "Font type" is set to "Custom font". If you select "Platform-independent font engine", Designer will use its platform-independent font engine. This has the advantage that it uses the very same font shaping algorithm on all platforms so text is guaranteed to look 100% identical across all platforms (assuming that the same font is used). Alternatively, you can set the font engine widget to "Host OS font engine", in which case the host operating system's font engine is used. Note that using this can lead to text objects looking very different depending on the platform you run Hollywood and Hollywood Designer on because the host operating system font engines use different font shaping techniques. Finally, you can also choose a Hollywood font plugin as the font engine here. This makes it possible to use features only supported by font plugins, e.g. the Pangomonium plugin supports emojis as well as advanced text layouts like right-to-left layouts, CJK scripts, etc. All these things are currently unsupported by the platform-independent and host OS font engines but font plugins like Pangomonium support it.
You can also set the text color and the line spacing on this page. The line spacing value is the number of additional pixels to add when vertically aligning lines. It can also be negative in which case lines are moved closer to each other by the specified number of pixels. Similarly, the character spacing value allows you to increase or decrease the spacing between characters. Positive values increase the spacing, negative values decrease it.
If you select the "Allow the user to edit this text object manually by clicking on it" option, users will be able to permanently change the contents of the text object by clicking on it. The contents of the edited text objects are stored in the location specified in the Project properties dialog. Note that editable text objects need to have a UID and the page they are on also needs to have a UID. Otherwise editable text objects will not work. See User settings for details.
If you activate the "Synchronize with page name" option, the text object's contents will automatically be set as the name of the page it is on. This is useful if you have a text object on your page that acts as some kind of page title or heading and you'd always like to have the contents of this header text object as the page name as well. Just tick this box and Designer will automatically set the page name to the text object's contents.
It is also possible to have Hollywood Designer synchronize the text object's contents with other text objects. If you want that, enter their identifiers together with the identifiers of the pages they are on in the text entry widget below. The page's UID must come first, followed by a colon, followed by the text object's UID. If you want to specify multiple text objects, use a comma as a separator and then repeat the specification, e.g. "PAGE1:OBJ1,PAGE2:OBJ2,PAGE3:OBJ3".
When the text dialog is opened because you have chosen the Change object style action event, you will see some additional options. If you select the "Ignore anchor point" option, the object will keep its exact position when the text is changed. Furthermore, you can set a new wordwrapping boundary when the text dialog in that case.
This page allows you to create unordered and ordered lists with Hollywood Designer. If you want to do that, you first have to tick the checkbox named "Enable list mode". Then you have to enter the individual items of the list on the first page of the dialog, one list item per line. Each list item must be started with a dash character. You can start sublists by prefixing list items using multiple dashes. The number of dashes indicate the indentation level, i.e. a single dash indicates the root list level, two dashes indicate the first indentation level, three dashes the second indentation level and so on. For example, this is what a list could look like:
- First item - Second item -- First sub item -- Second sub item --- First sub sub item --- Second sub sub item -- Third sub item -- Fourth sub item - Third item |
The actual look of the list can be configured by the widgets on the dialog page.
The second listview widget on this page allows you to configure how the individual list items should be shown. You can define a default show mode and individual show modes for the individual items in your list.
To set the default show mode for list items which don't have an individual mode set, select the "Default" entry and then configure the desired show mode using the widgets below. To set an individual show mode for a list entry, select it from the list, untick the "Use default" checkbox and then configure the show mode as you like.
The following options are available here:
You can also embed Hollywood variables in your text object. You need to use some special sequences then which are explained here:
%#(var)
%$(var$)
%NPlease note that Hollywood Designer creates all text objects before displaying the page they are on. This means that the values of the variables must be set before Hollywood Designer starts to create your page. For example: If you want to use a variable in a text object on page 2, you already need to set the variable in page 1.