As the signage screen can be split up into different size and shape zones, the editor has different matching page design modes to ensure the content fits into the zones correctly.
The infographic below shows you how the different editor modes are used with different zones.
To be clear, you could enter all the above content into a single zone, but with a setup like the above the banner zones for example could be cycling through different short messages independently of the rest of the screen.
The editor supports different zone types because a landscape page for example won’t display correctly in a portrait zone.
Different page or zone formats are controlled like any other page, so a banner zone on a screen can carousel multiple banner pages independently of the other zones.
The current options are:
Wide Screen – This type of page will correctly fill the screen of a normal widescreen TV or widescreen zone.
Ultrawide – Ultrawide displays are pretty much normal widescreen displays more or less cut in half along the horizontal so they have half the height of a normal widescreen display along with a higher resolution. You don’t see many of these used in typical signage systems.
Banner – This is a long narrow page that can be used to slot along the top or bottom of the signage screen that might be used to display a title such as the name of your organisation along with the time and date. This would also be good for showing a message ticker / scroller.
Skyscraper – This is a tall and very narrow page. Note that this is too narrow to correctly fill the screen of a TV in portrait mode. A combination of banner, widescreen and skyscraper page formats can all be displayed on a screen at the same time to give the classic three section webpage look of banner along the top, skyscraper to one side and a large main content area.
Portrait – Used for screens mounted vertically. Pages created in this format will look correct on portrait displays.
Portrait A4 – Normal portrait mode is quite a bit narrower than the standard A4 paper aspect ratio that you might have existing artwork or scanned artwork in. While TV screens aren’t A4 shaped you can for example fit ten A4 zones on a widescreen TV in two rows of five. That would allow your screen to display ten different A4 sized zones all at the same time.
You can of course show as many A4 sized images in one single zone as you can fit. The advantage of separate zones is that some zones can leave a single page on display permanently while other zones can carousel different images.
Square – You might want zones on your screen in a square format so this sizes the editor to have equal height and width settings. Due to the shape of pixels on displays it may not look completely square.
When opening a page in the signage editor that’s been designed in one of the different modes the editor sets itself to the correct format.
The displays can display different types of page shape on the same screen, so you could have a screen that just showed lots of rows of banner pages for example.
The different sized pages and zones all operate in the same way as the normal pages so a banner zone can show different banner pages in a playlist or carousel.
As having screens with multiple zones in them can be difficult to manage, the system allows you to give each zone a name such as ‘Main Zone’ to help you identify it.
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