AV News 195 - February 2014
Objects & Animations (part 3) Howard Bagshaw ARPS MPAGB
I've finally got round to talking about text and buttons, two more of the many
features available in the Objects & Animation window of PTE. Fortunately most
people will have little problem with the 'text' facilities. Use the 'T' icon and a new
text object will be inserted in the objects window.
By default the text is 'Text',
but within the 'properties' tab
you will be able to edit this text,
change font, colour, bold, etc.
While you can't change the text
in the image window, you can
move and scale it in the usual
way with the bounding box.
In the 'Common' tab you
have the facility to adjust the
drop shadow. Do try to avoid
totally eccentric font types and
for readability, text is better
positioned high on the screen, so that the audience in the third row can see it.
You will only need to use buttons if you are planning on making a menu
system or a manually controlled slide show (rather than an AV) where you want
to control the sequence of the images shown.
Buttons can have hyperlinks or other functions.
Example1: you have made a slide show of your holiday, first few slides set the
scene, then you have some slides of you in the disco which you might not want
to show to some audiences, then some pictures of the beach. Put a button on
the last of the 'intro' slides which, if you click on it, will jump the show to the first
of the beach slides. That's a jump within a sequence.
Example 2: you have several short AVs or slide shows of your holiday and you
want to be able to use a menu to chose which you
show to your audience. To do this you create a
new sequence, usually of one slide, which has a
number of buttons on it, clicking on any of these
will 'launch' a new AV. Using this you are jumping
to a different sequence.
Adding a button, changing its size and
appearance, etc is straightforward using the
facilities in the 'Properties' tab.
It's the hyper-linking which is new. In the
'Common' tab the hyper-link for the button is
controlled by 'Action on mouse click'. Here,
towards the bottom of the list of possible actions
you can make jumps within a sequence. 'Go to
slide with name...' can either link to the name of a
slide or to the slide number in the sequence.
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