iLife '04: The Missing Manual

Editing and Positioning Text

Although most people focus primarily on iDVD’s video buttons, drop zones, and so on, text also plays a critical role. It’s a dependable, instantly recognizable part of a DVD menu system.

The text that you can fiddle with falls into three categories:

• Menu titles help viewers figure out where they are in the DVD menu system by providing clues to the current context: “Our Vacation,” “Pictures (Week 1),” and “Scene Selection Menu,” for example. Title text usually appears at the top of the screen, although you can put it anywhere you like.

• Button text can appear either as labels above, below, beside, or on top of graphic buttons—or all by itself.

• Text boxes can appear anywhere on your screen. Thanks to this new iDVD 4 feature, you can create text boxes on your menu screens and fill them with whatever explanatory text you think is appropriate—instructions, introductions, a description of the project, and so on.

  To do this, choose Project → Add Text. Double-click the placeholder text and type away. Use the Settings panel of the Customize drawer to specify the font, color, and size of the text.

It’s a lot easier to edit text in iDVD 4 than in version 3, and a lot more consistent. Just select the text you want to modify and use the Text adjustments in the Settings pane.

Here, for example, is a boatload of techniques to help customize your text. Each method changes the selected text on only the currently displayed DVD menu screen.

Tip

Style changes (font , size, color) ...