How to force centering of lines

daryl178

I am porting a very large collection of PowerPoints into XML format so that these songs can be imported into OpenLP. I had embedded <div align="center"> for each textual line (denoted by <br/>) within the <lines> tag. This seems to be ignored.

Is there a general OpenLP setting to display each textual line of each verse horizontally centered? And then vertically centered?
Is there an XML sequence that OpenLP can import to allow this?

I can attach a PPTX and my corresponding XML if needed.

j_tizzle

daryl178 You can create a custom tag for centering text. I use:

ct (tag name) <div align="center" <div>

Another useful one I use all the time is justify-right:

jr <span style="float:right"> </span>

That is very useful if I have, say, a long quote and want to indicate "1 of x" unobtrusively.

funkydan2

Is there a reason you don't want to use templates for centering/layouts?

One of the strengths of OpenLP is that, in my workflow, it separates data and presentation. So the data (song lyrics/bible verses) is stored in one database and the presentation is done through the theming.

You can override the theme using formatting tags but I tend to use them sparingly.

j_tizzle

funkydan2 I use a lot of custom slides for teaching purposes. Custom formatting can be quite helpful in this regard.

daryl178

Hi funkydan2,

From the manual, I think you meant "themes" instead of templates, right? I only see templates being defined for footers. If that is not true, please tell me how to use templates for the body of the song from within the GUI since that would give me a little more flexibility when I scan these PowerPoints. I did create a new theme to at least horizontally/vertically center the verses. However, the manual does not describe each of the names within an exported JSON theme file and how they would be set from within OpenLP. I agree with separating data and presentation as much as possible; but I have 15 years of history to process.

PaulRowell

At the risk of stating the obvious, in your xml files , if you had the tag name "ct" defined in OpenLP as suggested above you would need to insert <tag name="ct"> and </tag> around the line you wanted to be centered.

daryl178

Thanks j_tizzle and PaulRowell. I actually did define a custom tag after my first align tag didn't have an impact. I finally identified that the ordering of themes (i.e., Song, Service, Global) was driving the result. After browsing through the .sqlite database, I noticed the theme column in the Songs table. I have two copies of the song and I set the theme name to two different values which OpenLp faithfully displayed once I changed the ordering of themes to Songs. However, when I exported the two songs to XML, the name of the themes was not present which I was expecting to be there. I really do not want to drive this with SQL statements directly; but I don't know what tag to add to the XML file to define a theme. Additionally, is there any documentation/description on the JSON content of the themes in the otz package?

PaulRowell

Most of our songs don't have a theme defined and therefore use the default theme. The default theme uses a font size that is as large as possible so that songs of upto eight lines will still fit on one screen. We then apply other themes to individual songs where the font size gets progressively smaller so that long lines don't wrap and thus a verse fits on the screen. Could you use this methodology?