Themes

A theme is the whole picture of one screen: type, colour, plates, the space around the words, and how a verse arrives and leaves.

It is not the background. What plays behind the words comes from a folder of backgrounds, so a theme and a background are changed independently. A theme can suggest a folder, and switching a screen to it offers to play that folder.

What a theme covers

A theme has a section per mode: Bible, songs, slides, alerts, the speaker plate, and the background it opts into. Each section says which modes it appears in and holds the elements drawn in them, placed on the theme’s canvas. Bible and songs sections can carry a second arrangement for when a parallel translation or language is live.

A theme with no section for a mode simply shows nothing in it, which is how a stage theme is built: Bible and songs, nothing else.

Bars behind the words

A plate is one box behind an element, the same size whatever the verse. A text’s Line fill puts a bar behind each line instead, and the bars grow and shrink with the words: Each line hugs every line, Longest line makes every bar as wide as the widest, and Whole box as wide as the element. A bar is as tall as the letters, whatever the line height, which only moves the bars apart: Top and bottom makes them taller, or thinner below 0. Bars that touch join into one shape, so a see-through colour never darkens where they meet, and Radius rounds every corner, the inside ones too.

Every theme is for a kind of screen

A theme is designed for one role, and the role is chosen when it is created and never changes afterwards:

• Projector, the screen the congregation reads.
• Stage, the monitor the musicians and the preacher read, usually with what is coming next on it.
• Lower third, a name and a role over video, fed to a mixer.

Screens have no role of their own, so any theme can go on any screen. The role is what the app offers first and what the library groups by.

Editing one

Open the theme in the Library and choose Edit theme. The theme editor covers its sections and elements, the states they appear in, and how they arrive.

A theme says nothing about language. Which language a screen speaks, and which translation it means by it, belongs to the screen, so the same theme can be on the projector in Ukrainian and on a foyer television in English. See Screens.

Judge it against a real verse rather than the word “Sample”: a long reference in Ukrainian and a short one in English do not test the same thing.

Every theme on every screen

BibleLook holds as many themes as you like, a Christmas set beside the everyday one included, and every one is editable without limit. Each screen shows a theme of its own: a stage display beside the projector, or a lower third for the stream. All of it is free.

Themes from the library

Themes published on biblelook.com install into the app from the web page. A theme is JSON and carries no files: its sections plus its backdrops, which arrive as a folder of their own under Backgrounds.

Importing always adds a new theme, and you are always asked first. The app offers to put it on one screen or on every screen.