Slides Formatting

There are many threads in this forum related to Slides and how insufficient this feature is. I am creating a new thread in hopes to bring this issue back to the top.

I have been using Worship Tools Pro for 2 years now and have learned to navigate the many quirks and unintuitive UI, but the Slides tool is by far the worst tool within Presenter.

It would not take much to make Slides a much more functional feature. Most principally, as many others have noted and explained, is a fully featured text editor. Editing text in Slide is an exercise in futility. The formatting does not remain constant while editing text, often reverting to some default when selecting and overwriting text. I often have to discard my changes and come back to the editor because I can't select the text anymore. Even though there is not an option for adjusting line spacing, it is not consistent, and will change from one edit to the next.

Additionally, the inability to change the layering order of boxes makes building and editing slides very difficult.

Since most of the time you'll want to set Slides to a background, you are editing the slide on a transparent grid which makes text very difficult to see and edit especially if it's white.

These are very basic functionality and quality of life improvements that have been requested by the community for nearly a decade with no response from developers which is simply unacceptable for subscription based "feature packed" software.

WorshipTools, please respond to the community about these issues and let us know if there any plan to improve this feature or not.

Here is an example of the line spacing issues. Both images show a slide with text that is formatted exactly the same way. The narrower spacing slide is on that was newly created, while the wider spaced slide is one I attempted to edit but when I deleted all the text and started typing again this was the result and there is now way to fix it but to start over with a new slide.

Narrow: https://drive.google.com/file/d/15gDcBW7BafXu9FgSccaJuxAt_P_i8ygw/view?usp=sharing
Wide: https://drive.google.com/file/d/11lBTJR_ajJUTWRUIt5zl3oDOId2Z7g8f/view?usp=sharing

You can also see in the above images that the editor canvas is not an accurate representation of the slide. If you compare it to the preview on the right there is more space than is shown on the canvas.

A simple Right-click Paste Format Only -- including precise COLOR -- would go a LONG way toward improving all the editing in Presenter.

This is the one reason that I am on the ropes about switching us over from Easy Worship. I have been playing around with it and it is clunky, difficult, and frustrating. Text editing should not be the most difficult portion of putting together a presentation, but the way it currently is on Presenter, it takes way too much of my time to make it viable. With Easy Worship I can simply copy and paste my text, and as long as I have a space where I want it to be a new slide, it creates the new slide in the same format that I set as MY default, then I just adjust the color of the text.

I have found a slight unintuitive workaround to the formatting. If you create a new slide then create a text area. Click in as if you are about to add text but first set all your font size, color, spacing settings. Then you can just paste your text in. If you create a template out of it, it makes things a lot faster.

It is as if the textarea contains font settings separately to the actual text.

Obviously work arounds arent the ideal way to handle this but if it saves someone else a headache until they feel like it needs changing.

It would also be great to be able to set different auto transitions within a Slides presentation.
Currently you can only set a global auto time transition that applies to all slides
but it would be great to be able to set individual timings and transition options for each slide within a Slides presentation.

While we're at it ... if you can't (or won't) give us a Paste Format Only, how about a text color selector that lets you pre-select a set of favorite colors. AND make the color selector dialog much larger so that the right-hand slider has some degree of subtle adjustability. It is virtually impossible to achieve consistent coloring from slide to slide unless you save the hexadecimal code somewhere >>> outside the app <<< then paste it into the color box. This should all be available within the Color dialog itself.

Another thing that should not take too much programming effort would be to allow the user to set their own default text font, size and other attributes. This would mean that if I start a new text box, I don't have to enter the text, then update it from Tahoma 22 point, white, no outline, no shadow to my preferred font and size with outline and shadow. I know you can set up a slide template, which starts to address this, but you still have this problem if you add a new text box.
It would also help if the templates could be edited. The current process of opening a template, making changes and then saving it back as a template (hopefully remembering the name correctly) is extremely hit and miss!

The text formatting for me is by the far the most frustrating part of the tool for me. Would love to get enhancements around line spacing especially.