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Author Topic: Automatical line break in miniature text?  (Read 4313 times)

Klaus_K

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Automatical line break in miniature text?
« on: March 29, 2016, 07:21:49 am »

Hi,

I was wondering whether it is possible to have miniature text with automatical line breaks in cover views. I have set the miniature text to show the album title, but since I have only classical music, these album titles tend to be on the long side with differences in text often coming "late" in the text string. So they end up looking all the same in my album cover view... The only known option (known to me at least) to show them at the moment is to scale-up the covers to a size which is not very convenient to navigate anymore.
Is this possible at all? How do you guys handle long album texts in cover view?

Thanks
Klaus
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ferday

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Re: Automatical line break in miniature text?
« Reply #1 on: March 31, 2016, 08:50:30 am »

I think some html works, try a line break?

Code: [Select]
<br>
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Klaus_K

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Re: Automatical line break in miniature text?
« Reply #2 on: March 31, 2016, 11:08:26 am »

thanks for the tip, but it is not what I would need. I'd like to have the text break based on the size of the cover thumbnail.
I can use the html line break only between tag fields. I'd like to achieve a line break within the string of a given tag, in my case the album tag...

There seems to be no possibility to achieve this, at leats to my knowledge. I was just wondering whether  it would be possible to implement? Maybe other users don't have the need for such a thing.

Klaus
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Arindelle

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Re: Automatical line break in miniature text?
« Reply #3 on: March 31, 2016, 11:43:19 am »

Can't be done I think it would be a feature request, but frankly as you have a vertical spacing issue, that would make the line up of the other icons uneven, so its sort of a compromise, either icon alignment, which I would have a hardtime if they didn't, and the ability to resize on the fly the icons which you can do now or wierd spacing between rows. Add the probelm of different screen resolutions auto wrapping seems to be complicated, but the devs would have to anser that one.

Maybe change the subject line to include Feature Request?

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Klaus_K

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Re: Automatical line break in miniature text?
« Reply #4 on: April 01, 2016, 05:37:37 am »

Hi Arindelle,

vertical spacing issues is a valid point - I didn't consider that. Tackling this probably rises more problems than it could solve...

But this also made me thinking about other display related questions. As much as I don't like Itunes, I think their current way of displaying detailed album information when selecting the cover is pretty cool. If this would be configurable in terms of displaying additional (custom) tags - similar to the way tooltips are currently displayed in JRiver when hovering over a track - that would be awesome for me. Bus this would probably lead to further discussion about track-related vs. album-related tags (album title, album rating and reviews)

Maybe also in a way similar to the existing "File" view. Couldn't this split view maybe used for displaying html information?

I know that you can use your own html templates for track info, but I never really managed to display

But this is now a totally different topic and it may be worth another thread.... ;-)

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Arindelle

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Re: Automatical line break in miniature text?
« Reply #5 on: April 01, 2016, 06:19:55 am »

But this also made me thinking about other display related questions. As much as I don't like Itunes, I think their current way of displaying detailed album information when selecting the cover is pretty cool. If this would be configurable in terms of displaying additional (custom) tags - similar to the way tooltips are currently displayed in JRiver when hovering over a track - that would be awesome for me. Bus this would probably lead to further discussion about track-related vs. album-related tags (album title, album rating and reviews)

Maybe also in a way similar to the existing "File" view. Couldn't this split view maybe used for displaying html information?

I know that you can use your own html templates for track info, but I never really managed to display

But this is now a totally different topic and it may be worth another thread.... ;-)

I don't know how iTunes shows the album info as I spent years getting it off my system and I'm not going to load it to check now!:)

But there are many, many ways to go about this. I think that arguably the real front end for most people would/should be Theater Mode or JRemote (and equivalents). Standard Mode is powerful, but needs one to be crouching in front of a computer/laptop. So using HTML to display via Track Info instead of cover Art is certainly doable it might not be the best area to prioritize. Just my opinion of course.

When I'm in standard mode for listening purposes I'm usually working or retagging on my workstation. Standard Mode offer the links bar which allows me to snap to all the album information I want directly on AllMusic for example. A shame this is not incorporated in Theater views and JRemote views.  Conversely you have an customizable info screen in Theater Mode which will do what you want right now (it could be improved but its pretty good.  But you don't have it out of the box in Standard View.  I think there are a lot of issues getting all platforms (Windows, MAC, and Linux) being able to do what the PC version can do which might be the reason UI changes haven't been much of a priority lately.

If you are a Standard view only guy (or you are on MAC or Linux and you don't have theater view.) What you might want to toy around with is the new Tag Window (shift+the tag icon will get you into it). This is totally customizable so you can show the metadata you want to see, in the order you want to see it (PLEASE DEVS do this for JRemote!!). You can set a toggle on the main menu to hide the tree and extend this tag window to take up the entire left part of the pane.  When you want information, you got it. When you want it hidden, toggle the tree off. You might want to give that a try in the mean time.

PS: You mentioned file view, but as I no longer have any out-of-the box, default views,  anymore, I'm not sure what you mean
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blgentry

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Re: Automatical line break in miniature text?
« Reply #6 on: April 01, 2016, 08:38:43 am »

We're talking about the thumbnail text displayed below album covers in a Categories View right?  You can edit what is displayed by going to the menu at the top of the view and then:  Thumbnails > Thumbnail text .

If you had a library field that displayed this "end of album text" that you're interested in, you could put that information on a line by itself.

What if you just wanted to auto-break the lines into smaller chunks?  That's doable, but it gets pretty tricky.  Here's an expression that will break the [Album] field into two lines, with 25 characters on the first line and the rest on the second line:

Code: [Select]
left([album],25)
right([album],math(length([album]) - 25))

This is very naive and not sophisticated at all, as it doesn't take into account tags that are more than 50 characters long, nor does it intelligently break between words.  Like I said, it's a very naive approach.  I'm just putting it here for illustrative purposes.  Not sure if that helps or not.

Brian.
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Ashfall

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Re: Automatical line break in miniature text?
« Reply #7 on: April 01, 2016, 09:24:08 am »

In Theater View, I also have several albums where the name is too long for the two lines of text in tile view.  Same for movies and some TV series.  Maybe scrolling text could be an option?  Probably a lot of effort to add such a feature.
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AndrewFG

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Re: Automatical line break in miniature text?
« Reply #8 on: April 01, 2016, 09:29:25 am »

^

My suggestion (aka feature request) is that wherever there is a text that is too long for the actual display line, it should be displayed in a scrolling "marquee" frame.

This particularly applies to "playing now" screens with concatenated texts e.g. "[track] from [album] by [artist]", in MC's Display View, and remote control apps (Gizmo, JRemote, etc.)

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