Temporarily changing a font size?

[Terry Pinnell]

This may sound a bit obscure, but please bear with me. If there's a
solution, it may have a wider application than mine.

I'm using the Windows Movie Maker program built into XP. It lets you
add text captions. I've made about 50-60 of these, but now I want to
make all of their font sizes one notch smaller. There is no obvious
provision for applying changes to multiple captions. And the
individual operation is mouse-based and slow. (You have to get to the
appropriate dialog and then click either a Smaller or Larger tool; no
scope even for entering a numerical size.) So I'm wondering if there
might be some clever hack that could do it? One long shot: would Win
XP Home let me temporarily change the font file, (MS Sans Serif) in
some way to achieve this?

I've posted this in the MovieMaker forum too, but it's fairly quiet
there so I thought maybe one of the experts here may have some
thoughts please.

 

[DatabaseBen]

i havnt used movie maker on my system. but i know there is a download from
MS as well. Maybe it has a fix for changing the defauly font used by movie
maker. But it doubtful, since captions are individually built by the user
as needed.

And substituting the font may have undesired consequences. If movie maker
has macro features or visual basic editing features, you might be able to
make the repetitive tasks of modifing the font for each caption performed by
a macro. If movie maker has default font somewhere in the options, then you
may be in luck.

What might help you out as well is to get a macro program to repeat the
repetitive task with a click of one button. A macro records a sequence of
events and mouse movements. Then you can play the macro by pressing a
key(s). If you know how to use macros, then the macro softwares that are
sharewares can help you.

Keep the macro simple and focus to the font. So you need to manually flip
to a screen, then initiate the macro, then flip to the next and again
initiate the macro and do on... You flip to the screens manually and the
macro alters the fonts...

If you try out the macro, be sure to backup your movie first and release all
the memory you can so that there are no other processes that would interfere
with the macro. Other than this, I think you may be on your own and simply
recustomize/change the captions manually...

 

[Terry Pinnell]

i havnt used movie maker on my system. but i know there is a download from
MS as well. Maybe it has a fix for changing the defauly font used by movie
maker. But it doubtful, since captions are individually built by the user
as needed.

And substituting the font may have undesired consequences. If movie maker
has macro features or visual basic editing features, you might be able to
make the repetitive tasks of modifing the font for each caption performed by
a macro. If movie maker has default font somewhere in the options, then you
may be in luck.

What might help you out as well is to get a macro program to repeat the
repetitive task with a click of one button. A macro records a sequence of
events and mouse movements. Then you can play the macro by pressing a
key(s). If you know how to use macros, then the macro softwares that are
sharewares can help you.

Keep the macro simple and focus to the font. So you need to manually flip
to a screen, then initiate the macro, then flip to the next and again
initiate the macro and do on... You flip to the screens manually and the
macro alters the fonts...

If you try out the macro, be sure to backup your movie first and release all
the memory you can so that there are no other processes that would interfere
with the macro. Other than this, I think you may be on your own and simply
recustomize/change the captions manually...

Thanks. Unfortunately, MM has none of those desirable facilities!

Great minds... As it happens I have been experimenting with the macro
approach. I used my 'power utility' program, Stiletto (long obsolete),
which amongst many other things lets me write 'macros' to apply
keystrokes and mouse operations using a hot key to start. My idea was
to select each overlay in the timeline and then trigger the macro. At
least that would greatly speed up the task.

It was promising, because I was able to emulate all of the operations
(opening the dialog, navigating to the text buttons, etc) with
keystrokes alone, i.e. without using mouse clicks (which complicates
matters). But unfortunately, for reasons I haven't pinned down, it was
erratic - working a couple of times and then failing. Quite often this
sort of failure seems due to some obscure timing issue.

Anyway, for the time being, I'm going to burn my final DVD with the
existing 'slightly too large' fonts, as I really do need to get away
from the PC for a while! But it's an interesting challenge and I aim
to return to it. Maybe I'll dust off another macro program I haven't
used for ages, called Macro Express, and see if that's up to the task.

I've also asked in one of the XP groups whether there's any mileage in
my 'font-changing' idea. It would appeal to me if I could somehow fool
Win XP into using a font say half the size of the one being called
<g>.

 

[DatabaseBen]

yeh, it seems you got some technical background...
sometimes the macro program are interrupted becuase of other ongoing
processes.
That's why it is ideal to close everything else out of memory.

Also, the timing issue with macros is an observent one, because it does
factor into
the macro's success. But the work around is to not make a one macro do all.
If i had any troubles with timings, i would break up the macro into several
ones.
Then I would use a sequence of keys to initiate the processes. I would do
something like
ctrl+1, ctrl+2, ctrl+3, etc..... In this example the complete macro would
run in 3
different increments. The timings of their initiation would be controlled
when it was time to press the
appropriate key combo.



Anyways, good luck with your project. And good luck with giving advice to
the Giant Company.....