HOW TO: Work with "Smiles"

In OnTheAir CG, there is a nice feature that few know about and it is called "Smile". So let's get you smiling!

A smile is simply replacing some text with an image (sill or animated sequence). Just as when you type ;-) on some chatting services, it will be replaced by a smiling face.

Here is how to use this in OnTheAir CG.

Create "Smiles" in your project 

The first step is to create your smiles. For this, create a project in OnTheAir CG Designer and select it. In the inspector on the right of the window, you will see a section called "Smiles": 

To create a new "Smile", click on the "+" icon and select which image you want to use from your disk. Note that you can use either:

• a still image
• an animated sequence tga or png. For that, just select the first image and read next.

Once you have selected an image, you can double-click on it to edit its settings:

The most important things to set here are:

• Animation: if it's an animated sequence tga, you should enable this checkbox, and set it in Loop if you want to keep looping
• Alias: We create a default "Alias", which is the text that will be replaced. It may be a bit difficult, and you can replace it by any text you want. For our example here, we'll use #SMSLogo

Once you have configured your Smile, you can start using it in any text items that you want in your project.

Using Smiles in items

You can use Smiles in Text or Ticker items. Let's do it in a simple text file for this example. Click on the text item icon at the bottom of the preview area and create a text item. Then in the "Inspector > Text",  just enter the "Alias" that you have configured. In our example, let's enter  #SMSLogo:

As soon as you have entered the text corresponding to your equivalent, you will see in the Preview area that your text is replaced by the image:

Note that the size of the image depend on the size of the Font used. So you may want to change this in the "Inspector > Text" area.