Can I create a group of specific lights within a matrix?

[szaske]

I'm moving over to Xlights from HLS, and this was a strong feature of HLS. This post might be considered a feature request.

I have a matrix on my house that is 72 pixels wide and 22 pixels tall.  Long but short, but it's really nice for displaying words to my various songs.  Now that I've switched to Xlights I've found the text tool in Xlights to be pretty weak/limited.  In HLS it was fairly easy to create groups of lights and you could call them what ever you wanted.  So I created a template of my matrix in Excel...and then I could, using Excel spell out some words on my matrix..like say "Holly Jolly".  Then I could take that set of pixels group them together into a group and call it "Holly Jolly".  Then when I'm creating my sequence I could just drop an effect on the "Holly Jolly" group and it would nicely spell out those words on my matrix.  Does Xlights have any feature like this?

Feature Request (and maybe this already exists I just haven't found it). It would be very cool if Xlights has some UI that showed me my Matrix and let me mouse click a bunch of the matrix pixels and let me easy create groups from the currently selected pixels.

[Gilrock]

You could create a sub-model in the model properties to do that.  It would probably be better to just forget anything you used to do in HLS cause there are almost always much simpler ways to do the same thing.  Just drop a Text effect if you want the words Holly Jolly and if you want another effect on those pixels then you just drop it on a layer above it and change the blend mode.

[szaske]

The reason I cannot use the Text tool is because it doesn't give me enough control over the font used. My matrix is created (I assume like a lot of us) using pixel strips with 1" spacing. That means using standard system fonts does not look very good.  To look good I need large fonts exactly 2 pixels wide for each stroke...it basically means I need to hand draw each letter.  Here is an example (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lvVR5KHkR8o) of my matrix in action.  I'm not interested in easy, I'm more interested in something looking good.

I appreciate you pointing me towards sub-models, that sounds like it may be just what I was looking for.  Probably the hardest part of switching SW is getting used to the new names for things in both packages.

[Gilrock]

The SuperStar fonts were designed for smaller letters.

The attached image has 2 pixels per stroke like you wanted.