Operating

The manual: the script, scrolling, screens, clocks, messages, the controller.

The control page holds the script and the controls; one or more viewer displays show it. Every binding named here is in Keyboard & controller, and Ctrl+/ lists them without leaving the page.

Screens

The room comes with a viewer link — /viewer?room=…, shown in the Viewers card with a QR code beside it. The control page itself is /control, and / redirects there. Open the viewer link on anything on the same network — a tablet on the floor, a laptop across the room, a phone — and it joins as a display.

Screen in the app bar opens one on this machine and closes it again; it lights up while that window is open.

Whether it opens fullscreen depends on having a second screen, and that is a browser rule rather than a setting. With two displays and the window-management permission granted, Chrome opens it fullscreen on the other screen — that is what its "fullscreen companion window" does. On a single screen it cannot: window.open consumes the click's user activation, and a fullscreen request has to come from the new window, which has no activation of its own and cannot borrow the opener's. So on one screen the window opens filling the available area with a thin URL strip, and one click on it goes to true fullscreen. Double-click toggles fullscreen at any time.

If you have a second screen and it still opens windowed, the permission is the thing to check — the console says so when it has been denied.

The viewer count reads "2 local · 1 remote" rather than a bare total, because those are very different situations to be in ten seconds before a service: three windows stacked on your laptop and three people watching on three devices both read as "3". A display works out which it is by itself, and "local" means the same browser on this machine.

If you reach the app by LAN address over plain http://, everything works, but see Self-hosting — a couple of browser features are only available on a secure origin, and it is worth putting TLS in front of it if this is more than a one-off.

The script

Type into the editor and every display updates as you go. Documents live in the control page's browser storage — the Documents dropdown switches, renames and deletes them, and whatever you were typing survives a refresh (writes are coalesced to one every 500ms, and flushed when the page is hidden).

Your place in the script is remembered per document, so a refresh — or a crash, or coming back to a document you were working on earlier — puts you back on the line you were reading rather than at the top. It follows the text rather than the pixels, so it still lands correctly if you have changed the reading size or dragged the divider since. Nothing the audience sees moves.

New asks what to call the document, with a generated name already in the field and selected: press Enter to keep it, or just start typing to replace it. Nothing is created until you confirm, so Escape leaves the open script alone.

Colouring the script

Colour is how a script says "this is a cue" or "do not read this aloud". Four colours have a key of their own — Ctrl+Alt+Y yellow, Ctrl+Alt+R red, Ctrl+Alt+B blue, Ctrl+Alt+N back to default — and Ctrl+Alt+C opens a searchable list of all of them, where typing "warn" finds red and "clear" finds the default. Ctrl+Alt+H applies whatever colour you used last, which is the quick way to mark several lines the same.

They work with text selected, and also with the cursor sitting in a line: then the colour applies to what you type next, so you can set a colour and write the cue straight out.

Every colour in the list has been checked for readability on a display's black background, which is why the blue is pale rather than a true blue — a true blue is unreadable at a distance. The editor's own colour picker in the toolbar still reaches any colour at all if you need one.

"Default" is not white: it removes the colour, so the line follows whatever your viewer theme sets. That is what you want if you ever change theme.

Holding an edit back

Live editing in the Sync card is on by default: what you type goes straight to the displays. Turn it off and your edits are held — open another document, fix a typo three pages ahead, paste in a late change, none of it appears in front of the talent. Send my script then shows them what you have.

While it is off, an amber pause icon sits in the app bar. That is deliberate: the setting is remembered between sessions, so without it a reload could come back quietly not-live and you would type into a screen showing something else.

Turning live editing back on publishes immediately — "go live" means the displays show what you are looking at.

Your own reading size

The A button in the editor's toolbar opens a slider for the size of the script in front of you. It is yours alone — it never reaches a display, so it is safe to nudge mid-service — and it is remembered for this browser. Ctrl+Alt+] and Ctrl+Alt+[ do the same from the keyboard, and Match viewers' size in the Sync card sets it to read like the displays do.

The viewers' size is the separate Text Scale slider in the Transport card.

Pasting a script

A script copied out of Word, Google Docs or a web page is black text on white. Every display is dark, and so is this page, so pasted exactly as authored it would be black on black. Brighten pasted text — on by default, in the gear — rewrites the colours on the way in:

• Black and near-black text loses its colour entirely, so it picks up the display's own ink and follows whatever a custom theme sets. It is not replaced with white, which is why an amber-on-black theme gets amber text.
• Red stays red and green stays green. A colour dark enough to be hard to read keeps its hue and is lightened until it clears the usual 4.5:1 contrast against black, so colour-coding survives — a rubric in red still reads as red.
• A colour that already reads on black is left alone, and so is a deliberate mid-grey.
• A light highlight is darkened rather than removed, keeping its hue: a yellow highlight becomes a dark yellow box. Removing it would be worse than it sounds, because brightened text inside a yellow box is white on yellow.
• A white page background, and grey table shading, are dropped.

Tidying a pasted script

The broom in the toolbar cleans up the mess a paste brings, in one step you can undo:

• Indentation goes. A script out of Google Docs is indented with runs of non-breaking spaces, not with any indent setting, so this is simply leading whitespace and it is removed.
• Trailing spaces go, on every line rather than only at the end of a paragraph.
• Extra blank lines collapse to one. A run of three or four line breaks — or of blank paragraphs — becomes a single blank line. A blank line you meant is left alone.
• Non-breaking spaces become ordinary spaces. Left in the middle of a sentence one stops the line wrapping there, which pushes a word to the next line on a display for no reason a reader can see.

It never touches your formatting: sizes, colours, headings, links and rules all survive, and code blocks keep their whitespace because indentation is the content there. If there is nothing to fix, pressing it does nothing at all — not even an undo step.

Two things worth knowing. This happens at paste time, so it changes the document rather than only what the displays show — undo puts the original colours back, and Ctrl+Shift+V pastes as plain text, which carries no colours at all. And a pasted document's own font sizes are always dropped, whatever this setting says, because they are absolute and would ignore Text Scale.

Making one part bigger than the rest

Select some text and pick a size from the 100% dropdown in the toolbar: 75%, 100%, 125%, 150% or 200%, or Other… to type any value between 50% and 400%. Unlike the two controls above, this is part of the script, so it travels to every display along with the words.

The sizes are relative, and deliberately so. A 150% line is half again as big as whatever the script is at the time, so the Text Scale slider still sizes the whole document for the venue and your marked-up emphasis moves with it. Nothing here pins text to a fixed size — if it did, the one control you change when you move from a chapel to a hall would stop working on exactly the lines you cared enough about to mark.

The dropdown reads the size of whatever the cursor is in, so it says 100% for ordinary text, or Other… when the size is one the presets do not list. A pasted document's own font sizes are dropped rather than honoured, for the same reason: they are absolute, so they would ignore Text Scale.

Next to it, Paragraph sets headings and code blocks — six heading levels, also reachable as Ctrl+Shift+1 through Ctrl+Shift+6, with Ctrl+Shift+0 for a plain paragraph. Headings are sized relative to the script too, so they scale with it. Typing # at the start of a line makes a heading as well, one # per level.

PDFs

Drop a PDF on the editor. It takes over the pane for the session, renders as a plain column of pages, and travels to the displays over its own data channel. Text Scale becomes a zoom where 1.0 is fit-to-width, which is where a freshly opened PDF lands. Close PDF returns to the script.

A PDF is held in memory only — deliberately never written to browser storage, whose quota it would blow through, taking the text documents with it. It is re-sent to a display that joins or reloads.

Scrolling

Scroll Speed is a two-way slider: down is forward, matching the direction the text travels, and up is reverse. Space starts and stops the scroll without forgetting the speed, which is a different thing from setting the speed to zero — zero leaves the pacer running for a cue you are about to jump to.

Exactly one display paces the scroll. Allow drive picks which; without a pick it is the first to connect. Only that display can also be scrolled by hand, and only it integrates the speed — two displays each running their own clock drift apart within a minute with nothing to pull them back.

Resizing from the display itself

The driving display can resize the script for the whole room: pinch it on a touchscreen, or hold Ctrl and scroll on anything with a wheel or a trackpad. The size travels back to your Text Scale slider and out to every other display, so the room stays in step and the slider goes on reading what the room is set to.

Only the driving display can do this, for the same reason only it can be scrolled by hand — two displays resizing at once would fight. On any other display the gesture does nothing at all.

Every display, the one being pinched included, keeps the line it was showing at the top of the screen. A bigger font wraps long paragraphs more than short ones, so the script gets taller by different amounts in different places; each display works out where its own top line went rather than being told a position.

Closing the gap

Your pane is deliberately not scroll-synced. You read ahead of, or behind, the audience; the Sync buttons close that gap on purpose, in either direction:

• Go to viewers pulls your pane to where they are.
• Send my position pushes them to where you are. Audience-visible.
• Match viewers' size / Send my size do the same for text size, so both ends put the same words on each line and the position buttons land somewhere recognisable.

Scrubbing from the preview

Turn on Scroll the show from the preview in Settings and a wheel or drag over the preview moves every display — the fastest way to put the talent on a particular line. It behaves like scrolling the driving display by hand: it displaces the position, and when you let go the scroll carries on from there at the set speed.

It is off by default and marked in amber while armed, on the preview itself and in the app bar, because the preview sits under your pointer: armed, a wheel that drifts over it while you were reaching for a slider jogs every display.

The preview

The preview has its own pane at the top of the sidebar, so it cannot scroll out of sight, and the divider under it sets its height. It is a true miniature — rendered at the previewed display's real pixel size and scaled down, so text wraps exactly as it does there.

Which display it mirrors is a separate choice from which one drives, because they need not be the same shape or the same device. Growing the pane past the point where its height is the limit letterboxes rather than enlarging: the aspect ratio stays the previewed display's.

Viewer Layout beside it switches every display's layout at once — see Themes.

Messages and clocks

A message overlays every display at whatever size fits its box — for "wrap up" or "mic 2 is off". Enter in the box sends it, so does Ctrl+Enter from anywhere else on the page.

The countdown and the wall clock are part of the viewer layout. The countdown has two modes, and Mode picks which of them Reset acts on:

• Duration — a length, in the three fields. Reset arms twenty minutes; twenty minutes from whenever you press it.
• Time of day — a wall-clock time, in the one field. Reset works out how far away that time is and arms the countdown with that, so "10:00" at 09:35 arms twenty-five minutes. Press Reset again whenever the plan slips and it re-reads the clock.

Either way it is Reset / Start / Stop from there, and Stop is a pause — Start picks up where it left off rather than starting over.

A target time that has already gone counts up past zero, the same way the countdown does at the end of a duration: at 10:04 a 10:00 target reads −4:00, which is how late the service is. If you would rather it meant the same time tomorrow — dialling 00:30 at 23:00 — turn on Roll a past target time to tomorrow in Settings.

What travels is the countdown's whole state rather than a start signal, which is what makes it survive: a display that reloads mid-service comes back where the countdown actually is, your own copy and every display agree to the same second, and refreshing the control page resumes rather than restarting — in the mode you left it in, with the field still filled. Reset returns to what you dialled in, not to wherever the countdown had got to.

Game controller

Plug in a controller and a pad icon appears in the app bar. Chrome only admits a pad exists once a button is pressed, so give it one.

The throttles are absolute, not incremental: the slider follows your finger and letting go stops. Squeeze both and they cancel. Pausing with Cross leaves the speed where it was, so resuming picks up where you left off — and a pad you are not touching never writes the slider, so the wheel and the arrow keys keep working with one plugged in.

The two sticks drive different things and neither touches the other's: the left one moves the script, the right one the column of cards — transport, clocks, message, sync, viewers — which on a short window is taller than its pane. The D-pad holds to repeat, so you can run the text size up without tapping; the buttons that do something once, like sending your position, fire once however long you hold them.

Buttons are read as commands, so a pad press, a palette row and a shortcut are the same action. Button numbering comes from the Gamepad API's "standard" mapping; a controller the browser cannot fit to that mapping is ignored rather than guessed at.

Settings

Per-browser preferences, in the gear:

• Reverse slider scrolling — whether a wheel over a slider moves the thumb the other way. Which physical direction a scroll reports is decided by your pointing device and the OS's "natural scrolling", neither of which the page can see, so this is a switch rather than something someone had to guess.
• Scroll the show from the preview — described above.
• Brighten pasted text — on by default. Described under Pasting a script below.
• Smooth mouse scrolling over the preview — on by default, and it exists for a specific device. A cheap mouse reports one coarse notch at a time, a hundred-odd pixels or three whole lines, and sent straight through that moves every display in a single jolt. On, a notch is spread over a shrinking series of frames and capped per frame, so several notches in a row blend into one continuous movement. A good trackpad or a high-resolution wheel already sends a smooth stream of small deltas, and easing those only adds lag — turn it off for raw scrolling there. A drag is never eased either way: it has to keep tracking your finger.

Live editing is remembered the same way but its switch is in the Sync card, where the other "what do the displays have" actions are.