News crawl
A news crawl is a layer that scrolls text across a band, the way a news channel’s ticker does, with fixed text such as a “BREAKING” badge, a headline or a clock drawn over it. The text can come from a text file that you edit while you are live; the crawl picks up the change on its own.
Every app has it: the egui app, and the macOS, Windows and Linux apps.
Adding a crawl
Add one from the Add menu’s Text group: News crawl ▸ and one of three looks, which you can change afterwards:
| Preset | Look |
|---|---|
| Breaking news | a dark band, a red BREAKING badge and one white lane |
| Business ticker | a navy band, two lanes (a fast ticker over slower headlines) and a clock |
| Headline bar | a light band with a large headline over a thin lane |
The new crawl sits across the bottom of the canvas, full width. It is a layer like any other: move and size it on the canvas, hide it, lock it, link it into other scenes, and edit it in Preview in Studio mode.
The band, lanes and slots
Select the crawl to design it in its Crawl section of the layer’s properties; the canvas shows each change as you make it.
- Band: its size in pixels, and a background colour or image.
- Lanes (up to 4): each scrolls its own items in its own strip of the
band (its top, height and side margins). A lane has a speed, the gap
between items, a separator (
•by default), a direction (right to left or left to right), whether it loops, its text style and an optional colour of its own. A lane that does not loop crosses once and is then empty. - Slots (up to 6): styled text drawn over the lanes at a place in the band.
A slot shows typed text, a text file, or a clock (
14:05,14:05:09or2:05 PM).
Add is disabled once a crawl has 4 lanes or 6 slots.
Items from a text file
A lane takes its items from text you type or from a text file, one item per
line. Blank lines and lines starting with # are skipped. A slot that reads a
file shows its first item.
The file is checked twice a second and read again when it changes, so you can edit it while you are live: in a looping lane a new line joins the queue without making the text on screen jump. A relative path is relative to your profile folder (see Where your files live). A missing or unreadable file shows nothing and a warning in the crawl’s properties, and the lane fills in when the file appears.
Notes
- On Windows the clock shows UTC, marked “UTC”, for now.
- A crawl in an exported collection (see Portable collections) keeps its style and typed text; lanes and slots that read a file come in empty, and the background image and font files are left out, so a collection never reads files on the computer that imports it.