Text Formatting for Responsive Liturgy

[RevRichB]

I'm evaluating software for worship projection and would like feedback on how well (or how badly) different software handles the formatting of text.

How easy is it to define a format for text said by the minister (for example italics) and a different format for the congregational response (for example bold and maybe a different font or color or size etc.)? Can these two formats be shown easily on the same screen?

I'm currently evaluating Songshow Pro, MediaShout, Easy Worship and Presentation Manager Pro - so answers for these would be especially welcome.

Thanks. R

[Creonus]

Welcome to CMN, Rich!

We don't exactly have "responsive liturgy", but we do have songs with male/female parts or leader/follower parts. That being the case, I will chime in about EasyWorship, the one we use.

EasyWorship does support various formatting within the same song. If you can use a word processor, it's about the same degree of complexity. Just highlight and change.

One aspect that had caused some confusion to us is that the EW edit screen is not completely WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get). There's two "windows" -- text and display. The display window will show your text with all the formatting applied. The text side (where all the editing and formatting is applied) does not show formatting at all.

As most people on the forum will point out, try them all out. What works for me might not be the best for you (or the operator).

[[Admin] osborn4]

SongShow Plus comes with Slide Show Builder, which will allow you to format the text pretty much any way you want, and include graphics on the slides, as well.

You can also direct insert scripture in Slide Show Builder from whatever scripture sources you have connected to SSP.

[[Director] Joseph B]

Easy way - forget doing it in the worship software and make a graphic slide - This will give you TOTAL control to do what you want.
You can do italics, different colors, different sizes, different text styles, highlights, underlines...whatever floats your boat. Save as a jpg and you're done.

[Gene]

MediaShout handles formatting a responsive liturgy quite well. I put the pastor's or assistant's parts in plain, and the congregation's part in bold. See the attached example.

[hussra]

Originally Posted by RevRichB

I'm evaluating software for worship projection and would like feedback on how well (or how badly) different software handles the formatting of text.

Hello, welcome! There are a small number of us UK types on here, good to hear from another one. (I'm in Solihull, West Midlands.)

I too am interested in the answer to this question; I asked about it around a year ago (thread here) but am still searching for the best solution for us.

At present we're using EasiSlides which has the advantage of being free but is useless for formatting liturgy as you can't change the text formatting with in a slide. So we use PowerPoint for that. Whoopee. I did write a little converter program that takes a service from Visual Liturgy and produces PowerPoint from it.

The big question is how closely you want to mirror the layout of the printed Common Worship books, and in particular whether you want to include the marginal note "All" that indicates which lines are for the whole congregation, like this:

liturgy1.png

I tried to reproduce this formatting in the evaluation versions of EasyWorship and MediaShout. (Again, about a year ago.)

EasyWorship will let you do the formatting of the text; the major stumbling block I ran up against there was that there was no way of getting it to do a consistent hanging indent; how wide the tab character came out seemed to depend on various factors that I just could not figure out to get things looking good.

I had more success with MediaShout but the evaluation version seemed incredibly crash-prone. From memory, I did manage to get it layed out as in my PowerPoint files. The other problem with MediaShout for us was the non-availability of the required Bible versions (Good News Bible and Anglicised NIV). I note that EasyWorship does now have the Anglicised NIV.

At this point I pretty much lost the impetus for evaluating worship software and we've stuck with EasiSlides, with lots of PowerPoint stuck in for good the tricky bits, since then. Joseph B's suggestion is a good one but we do have rather a lot of texts available to us here in the Church of England. (I think I'm at about a foot of bookshelf space and counting...)

Best wishes,

Richard

[RevRichB]

Thanks Richard - very helpful. Once I have VL correctly installed(!) I expect I shall use your little converter. I found this Grove books website with some PowerPoint macros useful, especially the CursorSplitSlide. Given the length of some Anglican liturgies you too might find helpful.

[[Admin] osborn4]

Can you give us a link to the web site with the CursorSplitSlide macro?

That sounds handy.

[hussra]

Originally Posted by RevRichB

Thanks Richard - very helpful. Once I have VL correctly installed(!) I expect I shall use your little converter. I found this Grove books website with some PowerPoint macros useful, especially the CursorSplitSlide. Given the length of some Anglican liturgies you too might find helpful.

You're welcome. I'm still on Visual Liturgy 4.1 here, not Visual Liturgy Live, so if you run into problems with the latest version let me know ( or send a PM). I do know it works with both Church of England and Methodist versions of Visual Liturgy 4.x.

The macro at Grove is indeed very handy!

For others wondering what on earth we are talking about: Grove Books are a UK publisher of short and sweet booklets on all manner of ministry-related topics. They did one on using PowerPoint for data projection, useful because it approaches the subject from the perspective of the liturgical churches. The accompanying download includes some rather useful PowerPoint macros including a natty one that splits a slide at the current cursor position.

Best wishes,

Richard

[hussra]

Originally Posted by hussra

The accompanying download ...

Just a quick follow-up note. The macros in the download will not work without changes to PowerPoint's macro security settings. Tools, Options, Security tab, click Macro Security..., set to Medium (or Low if you really want...)

Best wishes,

Richard

[Sysmom]

We don't have a formal response portion either, but do have songs where the congregation 'echoes' or men's and women's parts.

I use COLOR more than bold or italics, to set things apart when I am able to.

It seems to work much better for our congregation that using font styles of bold or italics. In the case of a song, the part I want to stand out is the part the congregation sings, and I'll make that yellow, or another color that stands out, but goes with the background.

I'm wondering whether this isn't a cultural phenomena. Our parents/grandparents might have responded quicker/better to italics, because that's all they had in print for emphasis.

Anyway ... there's my two cents worth. I use font color just like you'd use a highlighter on a page to emphasize something for the reader, I guess.

deb

[hussra]

Originally Posted by Sysmom

I use COLOR more than bold or italics, to set things apart when I am able to.

It seems to work much better for our congregation that using font styles of bold or italics.

Yes, colour certainly helps a lot. I've tried to mirror somewhat the layout used in our denomination's printed service books ("Common Worship") and in the locally produced booklets that are used on Sundays when we don't currently use the projector.

The printed books use black, bold text for congregational texts and black, normal weight for the leader's part; rubrics are (as the name originally meant) red, and in italics:

book.png

Our local booklets are similar but all-black, e.g.

booklet.png

So part of what I've been doing is to try and keep something of the layout our folks are familiar with. But I did find that different colours for the leader and congregation as well as emboldening the congregational texts helped a lot, like the example I posted earlier in the thread. Experience seems to show that without that tell-tale word "All" in the margin then people here don't quite have the confidence to join in.

One thing's for sure, a 16:9 aspect ratio would really help get stuff onto the screen with that margin there.