Floating Text Height - Can you adjust it?

I'm only asking out of curiosity (not life or death important)

A few times I've used a short simple free script to just put some floating text above a prim.

Is there any way to alter the distance above a prim text floats?

Thanks.

As far as I'm aware, there isn't a straightforward way to do it by scripting. You can always add blank lines (\n) to your text to raise it further above a prim, of course. Also, if you have a multi-prim object you have some choice about which prim the hover text resides in, and therefore how it is positioned relative to the whole object. Personally, I consider hover text to be generally a blight on the SL landsape, so I avoid it as much as I can. But that's me ...

Thanks.

Actually I agree about hover text for most things, but a few items they are good.

Or course, if they did not show thru 2m of solid prims so you could clock them by putting a box round the item (or text) it would help.

Actually I normally find the text is too far away from the item and wondered if by some positioning method you could move the hovertext closer to the prim

try turning the prim on it's side, the text is usually half way "up" that way. and then to adjust the height put some lines before or after it. before should lower it and after should raise it. of course if turning the prim on it's side won't work with the design of the object, you can add a small invisible prim that holds the floating text script, and move it around so the text is where you want it

Unless something has changed, you can't simply add blank new-lines. If there are no characters on the extra lines, they are ignored. A typical solution is to use a single period on each extra line needed. Example: "hover text raised three steps higher\n.\n.\n."

Other tricks...

Use an invisible, linked prim
Cut the prim in half using either cut b/e or the sphere trick and rotate it
Make the prim larger, hollow it, texture it so that only the inside hollow face is visible

I seem to recall the the prim size matters too.

Apparently only the prims Z scale affects the hover text height. I love the idea of including \n\n\n\n to raise it. I've left it out of some things because I couldn't remove it from the center of the object.

Actually, what would be useful would be the visual equivalent to llWhisper that you could apply to floating text. The way it is now, floating text gets bigger as you back away from an object making it more and more obnoxious. The saving grace is that it disappears if you back off far enough. If you could whisper the text so it fades when you are only, say, 10m from the object, that would be a great improvement.

I'd probably still avoid using floating text anyway, myself, but SL would look a lot nicer if OTHER people could whisper it.

Yeah, I found this out the hard way, when I rotated my vendors 90 degrees, and used "taper" to make a nice bevelled-edge "frame" around the vendor image.. the hovertext was glued to the center of the vendor, because the prim was only 0.1m thick in the z-axis.

Thank goodness I was able to turn that hovertext off.

Neat trick about Z though... Z is also the direction that is affected when a prim is "tortured". So if you "dimple" a cube (switch to sphere, dimple, then switch back to a cube).. you can affect the "visual sizes" of a prim.

Another neat trick, is to make a smallish invisible prim in a linkset, with a tiny script that just listens for linkmessages. Then you just pass a (message + "|" + colorvector + "|" + alpha) down through the linkset, instead of using llSetText directly. (or you can send just message.. and use the same colour and alpha all the time). This allows you to place the "text prim" anyplace you need it to be, relative to the rest of the build.

Oh.. and there *IS* an alpha setting.. people forget about that. It does seem to affect how far away the text is visible.

i wonder why (on earth) LL diddent included a 2. vector that would control the posistion. It is a -mysterie- to me :/

BR.
ab