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Telematic Theater

Managing layouts (advanced)

This section is covered in this video tutorial I did a while ago. I don’t want the video to become publicly available but it can help to write this section.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1VNQfIM63YN0X-V2-CxU5emND9E7pXPej/view?usp=sharing

How layouts work

Section titled “How layouts work”

Layouts are not limited to the ones described in the previous part: more can be added, and the existing ones can be modified. Notice though that it requires some familiarity with Max to be done.

Technically, each layout is a list of all existing modules with their onscreen visibility (@hidden) and position (@presentation_rect). These information are saved as JSON files into telematic-theater/Telematic-Theater/data/layouts.
For now layouts are part of the app settings and thus are shared across projects. If you create a new layout or modify an existing one in a given project, the changes will be available for any other project opened with the same instance of the application.

How to manage layouts

Section titled “How to manage layouts”

To edit the currently loaded layout (see the Edit Layouts feature):

  1. Unlock the Max patch (CMD+E)
  2. All available modules will appear on screen, possibly some of them will be visible only after scrolling.
  3. You can now edit the layout:
    • To change the visibility of a module, select the module (it’s a [bpatcher] object), open the Inspector, and set its @hidden attribute. A value of 1 means that the module will be hidden when the patch is locked (as it is in normal use). A value of 0 will make the module visible.
    • To change the position of a module, simply drag it to the desired location. You might want to move unwanted modules out of sight to accommodate the visible ones.
  4. Once you’re done with the changes, lock the patch (CMD+E) to make sure the result is correct.
  5. In the Layouts module (this one should remain visible!), either click “Save current” to overwrite the last selected layout (visible in the menu) with the current one, or click “Save as new” to create a new layout file, in which case a dialog box will open, asking for a layout name.