Beginning with MediaShout 7.6.5 you can save the formatting of Lyric title pages with a template. This allows you to apply a template to a lyric cue and have all pages—including the title page—formatted as you desire. If your default Lyrics template has been configured this way, all songs that you insert from the Lyrics library will also have the title page formatted as you desire when they are inserted to the script. And this also applies to Lyric Stage templates as well!
There are now two ways to save the Title page formatting with a template:
- Modify the formatting of an existing title page and save it. (This requires you to keep all existing elements in the original order, but it is the easiest method).
- Go to a Lyric cue in a script which contains a title page and select that page to edit.
- Edit any formatting which you would like to change on the text items or to the the object itself, including FX settings. (Do not delete or rearrange the order of anything.)
- With the Title page selected as the current page in the Editor, go to the Templates popup drawer and "Save As..." using a new name for the template.
- This step is critical! If you do not have the Title page selected when you save, the edits will not be saved with the template.
- You can now apply this template to other cues and set it to be your default template. (In some rare cases you might need to close and reopen before the new template is usable.)
- Convert a Title page to use new 'tag based' formatting. (This is more complicated, but it will allow you to use whatever tags you want in any order on the page, and you don't need to use all of them.)
- Begin by selecting a Lyric cue in your script which already contains a Title page.
Convert all of the fields on the title page to tags. [Song title] becomes <Title>, [List of authors] becomes <Authors>, etc. The tags will be <Title>, <Authors>, <Copyright>, <Permission>, and <CCLI>. When you are finished, you will have something like this:
- Format the text of each field how you would like, rearrange them, or delete the ones you don't want.
- You can also add any additional text that you want to appear on every title page. We refer to this as 'literal text' because it will not vary from song to song, so this would be helpful if you prefer to have labels like "Title:" on your title page. (To use that example, you would enter it like this: Title: <Title>, and the result for the song Amazing Grace would be Title: Amazing Grace.)
- In addition, you can add or remove blank lines for desired vertical spacing.
After editing, you might have something like this (changed author font size; moved CCLI to same line as permission and added " | " between them; moved Copyright to the bottom; changed font size of all bottom fields; added outline and shadow to all text):
- With the Title page selected as the current page in the Editor, go to the Templates popup drawer and "Save As..." using a new name for the template.
- This step is critical! If you do not have the Title page selected when you save, the edits will not be saved with the template.
You can now apply this template to other cues and set it to be your default template. (In some rare cases you might need to close and reopen before the new template is usable.) The example shown above will now look like this:
That's it! With this new feature you can customize your Lyric title pages to match your creative style.
Notes:
- You must apply all desired formatting and edits to a tag based title page template prior to saving it. The resulting template will not work correctly if you later apply it and then re-edit the formatting of the resulting title page due to the fact that the tags are no longer in place when it is saved. If later edits are necessary, reconvert all of the text fields to be tags again.
- CCLI number, in the context of title pages, always refers to an organization's CCLI license number—not to the song number. The number shown in all title pages for CCLI will be the organization number which is populated by the user in Settings > Library > Lyrics.