Common text controls> Options Box

The Options Box is where the text filters begin. You choose the font or fonts you are going to use. You can type text into the empty Text Field. Import an ASCII-based text file via the Load or Import button. Or copy/paste from that file into the text field. If you don't fill in the text field, you will need to choose the Random Characters checkbox once you go to the plugin interface.

For some filters, like Text Hacker, filling this Text Field in a specific way is essential to the plug-in performing properly. For others, such as Text Grid, you may want to leave that field blank to take advantage of their Random Characters option.

What are common controls? Many of the Text plug-ins share parameters that behave the same. To avoid having to repeat these definitions, we cover them once here. If a parameter has special attributes in a plug-in, it will be further explained on that plug-in's manual page.

 

 

 

Multiple Fonts pop-up

In some of the filters, the initial dialog box that appears will have five Font pop-ups. These pop-ups let you choose and use multiple fonts with the filters. Any pop-up that is blank will be ignored.

If Font Rate of Change is 0, the filter will randomly cycle through the fonts that you have specified. If Font Rate of Change is any value above 0, the filter will cycle through the fonts in order. All characters will change from one font to another; there’s no option to change only some of the characters, except in the Text Hacker filter.

The text characters can either be generated randomly, hand-entered by yourself, or imported from an ASCII-based text file. To input text, type the text you’d like to use in the initial dialog box. To import text, click the Load button to navigate to a .TXT file as you’d create in MS Word or Notepad or TextEdit.

 

 

Sequential Fonts checkbox

Tells characters to change fonts in a sequential order, if the plug-in has the Multiple Fonts option. Going down the list of Multiple Fonts, the animation will start off as Font 1, change to Font 2, then to Font 3, and so on. If Sequential Fonts is not selected, then a font will be chosen randomly from the fonts that have been selected.

 

 

Whole Lines checkbox

Tells the plug-in to sequentially display whole lines, which are defined by a hard return. The filter goes through the text field or file, identifies a line, displays the line, then begins a new line. If Whole Lines is turned off, then words are displayed.

 

At left, both Whole Lines and Sequential Lines turned on. This results in the filter just playing back the text you entered.
At right, both options turned off. This gives us randomly selected words.

 

 

Sequential Lines checkbox

Tells the plug-in to read the text sequentially. The text file is read from beginning to end, with no random jumping around. This is turned on by default.

If Sequential Lines is turned off, words or lines are picked at random to be displayed.

If Whole Lines is also turned on, then the first stream displayed gets the first line, the second stream gets the second line of text, the third streams gets the third line, and so on. Otherwise, words get inserted into the streams sequentially, with no attention paid to where the lines begin and end.

 

 

Lock checkboxes

For filters that use a particle system, each stream, line or character can have its own set of attributes. The Lock checkboxes determine if these attributes change over time, or whether they’re ‘locked’ in place when the stream, line or character is created and first displayed on the screen.

If Lock is NOT selected as you animate a parameter, everything on the screen will change. For example, use the Lock Color checkbox with the Color parameter. Animating from red to green to blue will cause all the characters on the screen to change from red to green to blue.

However, if Lock IS selected, then the stream or line will stay with whatever value it was created with. Only new streams/lines will be affected by the keyframed value. In the case of Color, that means the streams created first would be red, streams created a little later would be green, and streams created last would be blue.