Table of Contents
Clock
There are two main types of Clock visualizations supported by BEYOND. An Analog clock uses four frames for the second hand, minutes hand, hour hand, and the background frame. BEYOND rotates the hour, minute, and seconds frames according to the current system time. The second type is a digital clock. Technically, BEYOND generates a text frame and later outputs it as a text image by means of a font just as BEYOND does with Scrolling Text images within the Frame editor.
Toolbar
| New | opens a new Clock (current clock settings will be erased). |
| Open | opens a Clock from previously saved file. |
| Save | saves a Clock to a file. |
| Properties | opens the Image properties dialog box. |
| Yellow Tag | assigns an identifier to the Clock object (for PangoScript). |
| Quad | shows the coordinate grid. |
| Stop | stops clock execution, may be important for a Count Down effect. |
| Play | starts the clock. |
| Set Font | selects the font for a digital clock. |
Clock type
The first step in creating a Clock is to choose the clock type in the Clock Type panel.
Placement
Size X and Size Y controls the overall clock size.
Position X and Position Y controls the clock position.
Character size - font size control (works for digital clock only).
Character spacing - defines the distance between characters.
Digital Clock Delimiters
Use HH:MM:SS option allows you to define your own delimiters. Otherwise, BEYOND use PC system time in system format defined within the OS regional settings.
For using your own format, you can define what to display, starting from milliseconds up to days (Which is classic for New Year’s Eve countdown clocks).
Vertical digit location instructs BEYOND to place characters one under the other, as example, instead of
00
BEYOND will use this placement:
0 0
Background frame
The Background frame is just a static frame that can be used for the analog clock as well as the digital clock. By default, the background frame is not controlled by Size or Position sliders, which allows for adjusting the position of the clock part frames relative to the background frame.
Countdown
The Count Down panel allows you to see the date and time for the count down or count up clocks.
Character placement
Fixed character position transforms the font into a mono-spaced font. The characters have variable width by defaults and when the numbers change, it can cause the characters to move to the left or right of the static text parts that you might expect to stay static. The mono-spaced positioning fix this situation.