Chapter 6: RealText Markup
With RealText, you can create timed text presentations that can stream alone or in combination with other media such as audio or video. This makes RealText a handy means for adding text to SMIL presentations. Using RealText, you can add subtitles to a video, for example, or provide closed-captioning. This chapter explains the RealText markup. Appendix E provides a reference for RealText tags and attributes.
Understanding RealText
Using any text editor, you can create a RealText clip in a text file that uses the file extension .Rt. The file includes the text you want to display, as well as the RealText markup that describes how to display and time the text. Like a RealVideo or Flash clip, a RealText clip has a height and width, as well as an intrinsic duration, from a few seconds to several hours. The following are some of the features that RealText provides:
- Font, size, and color control
The RealText markup lets you create text in many different fonts, sizes, and colors.
- Timing control
RealText timing commands control when each paragraph, sentence, word, or letter appears. You might display a new sentence every few seconds, as in a video subtitle. Or you could make letters appear one at a time as if they were being typed across the screen.
- Flowing text
Within a RealText clip, words can scroll up the screen or from side to side. This lets you create a window of smoothly flowing text. You can even make text loop, creating an endlessly flowing marquee.
- Positioning commands
With the optional positioning commands, you can control exactly where each word appears within the RealText window.
RealText Language Support
RealText supports a number of languages, including English, Chinese, Korean, Japanese (Kanji), and many European languages. It can stream text in any language that can be written in one of its supported character sets, which are listed in the section "Specifying the Character Set". Each character set supports at least one font, as described in "Setting the Font".
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