Hello, I work for a school and we use brightsigns in our cafeteria, where the menus change daily. I have been doing a data merge with Microsoft Publisher to create images for the daily menus, and then publishing each image to the corresponding day in brightauthor - however this is a really cumbersome way to publish the daily cafeteria menus.
Does anyone have any suggestions on a more efficient way to publish our daily cafeteria menus to brightsign devices using brightauthor?
You could do the following:
Separate the textual info from the image background, by overlaying the menu items' textual info using Live Text state, over a background image.
The Live Text state in BrightAuthor can accept values from User Variables. Variables would be named like:
item1
price1
item2
price2
etc...
Example for showing on the menu Apple which costs 1.00.
Set User Variable item1 to Apple.
Set User Variable price1 to $1.00
You could then use the BrighSign app to manage the values of the user variables from a mobile device, or from a web browser.
https://www.brightsign.biz/brightsign-app/
https://brightsign.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/DOC/pages/370671834/Dynamic+User+Variables#Web-Browser
Thank you for the suggestion. Question, doing it this way the menus would need to be updated manually every day, correct? Maybe I am reading it wrong.
You'd need to update the menu only when the presented items and or prices need to be updated.
Once a user variable is set to a particular value, it will retain that value even if the player is rebooted.