About a month ago I was playing about in Isadora and discovered the Text/ure actor. Unlike some of the other text display actors, this one hides a secret. This actor lets you copy and paste into a whole block of text that you can then display one line at a time. Why do that? Well, that’s a fine question, and at the time I didn’t have a good reason to use this technique, but it seemed interesting and I tucked it into the back of my mind. Fast forward a few months, and today on the Facebook group – Isadora User Group (London) – I see the following call for help:
And that’s when I remembered the secret power of our friend the Text/ure actor. Taking Raphael’s case as an example let’s look at how we might solve this problem in Izzy.
First off we need to start by formatting our list of words. For the sake of simplicity I’m going to use a list of 10 words instead of 100 – the method is the same for any size list, but 10 will be easier for us to work with in this example. Start off by firing up your favorite plain text editing program. I’m going to use TextWrangler as my tool of choice on a Mac, if you’re on a PC I’d suggest looking into Notepad++.
In TextWrangler I’m going to make a quick list of words, making sure that there is a carriage return between each one – in other words I want each word to live on its own line. So far my sample text looks like this:
Boring, I know, but we’re still just getting started.
Next I’m going to open up Isadora and create a new patch. To my programming space I’m going to add the Text/ure actor:
So far this looks like any other actor with inlets on the left, and outputs on the right. If we look closely, however, we’ll see a parameter called “line” that should catch our attention. Now for the magic. If we double click on the actor in the blue space to the right of our inlets, we suddenly get a pop up window where we can edit text.
Next let’s copy and past our words into this pop up window. Once all of your text has been added, click “OK.”
Great. Now we have our text loaded into the Text/ure actor, but we can’t see anything yet. Before we move on, let’s connect this actor to a projector and turn on a preview so we can get a sense of what’s happening. To do this start by adding a Projector actor, then connecting the video outlet of the Text/ure actor to the video inlet of the Projector.
Next show stages – you can do this from the menu bar, or you can use the keyboard shortcut Command G. If you’re already connected to another display then your image should show up on your other display device. If you’d like to only see a preview window you can force preview with the keyboard shortcut Command-Shift F.
Alright, now we’re getting somewhere. If we want to change what text is showing up we change the line number on the Text/ure actor.
Alright. So now to the question of shuffling through these different words. In Raphael’s original post, he was looking to not only be able to select different words, but also to have a shuffling method (and I’m going to assume that he doesn’t want to repeat). To crack this nut we’re going to use the shuffle actor, and some logic.
Let’s start by adding a shuffle actor to our patch, and let’s take a moment to look at how it works.
Our Shuffling actor has a few parameters that are going to be especially important for us – min, max, shuffle, and next. Min, like the label says is the lowest value in the shuffle stack; Max is the highest value. Shuffle will reset the our counter, and reshuffle our stack. The next trigger will give us the next number in the stack. On the outlet side of our actor we see Remaining and Value. Value, is the shuffled number that we’re working with; Remaining is how many numbers are left. If we think of this as a deck of cards then we can start to imagine what’s happening here. On the left, shuffle is like actually shuffling the deck. Next is the same as dealing the next card. On the right the Value would be the face value of the card dealt, while remaining is how many cards are left in the deck.
Alright already, why is this important?! Well, it’s important because once we get to the end of our shuffled stack we can’t deal any more cards until we re-shuffle the deck. We can avoid this problem by adding a comparator actor to our patch. The comparator is a logical operation that compares two values, and then tells you when the result is a match (True) and when it doesn’t (False).
To get our logic working the way we want let’s start by connecting the Shuffle’s Remaining value to the value2 of the Comparator. Next we’ll connect the true trigger from the Comparator back to the Shuffle inlet on the Shuffle actor.
Great, now we’ve made a small feedback loop that automatically reshuffles our deck when we have used all of the values in our range. Now we can connect the Value outlet of the Shuffle Actor to the Line input of the Text/ure actor:
There we have it. Now the logic of our shuffle and comparator will allow us to keep running through our list of words that are in turn sent to our projector.
Matthew Ragan 