Following 2 months of work, the display and text rendering code has been replaced. Due to the magnitude of the change there may still be bugs, so please report them in the usual way.
These changed allow a number of significant new features to become available:
Text over video now works correctly.
Changeable image and video backgrounds now have a proper start and finish.
Text enhancements are now available like colours and styles (bold, italic, etc).
Spell checker for songs and custom slides.
Unfortunately we've had to remove two theme features as they are no longer possible: transparent backgrounds, which was an early attempt to implement text over video, and indentation for line wrapping. Any transparent themes will automatically be converted to a black background.
Also note that themes may now display slightly differently as we are using a different display technology.
To access the new text enhancements, edit either a song or a custom slide and you'll see a new menu has been added to the right-click context menu of the edit box. This will allow tags to be inserted as a pair or wrapped round selected text. We will no doubt implement a nice WYSIWYG editor in a future release. Eventually we'll even allow the user to define their own tags, so that they can add styles to their slides.
From a developer's point of view to code is now much simpler and easier to maintain going forward. The new code is based on a web browser so HTML tags now can be added to text for display. Tags are implemented using a non-HTML tagging mechanism, so that it is easier to work with the tags and the text.
As an additional bonus, I have added a spellcheck to the songs and custom editors. It makes use of the PyEnchant libraries, so Linux users will need to add "python-enchant" (Fedora and Ubuntu) from their code repositories, and Windows users will have to download the library from http://www.rfk.id.au/software/pyenchant/download.html. The builds will include this library automatically.
The screenshot you see here of the development team's favourite song is an example of what we can achieve.
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