What is Poetical?
Poetical is a plug-in designed to store the words of your favourite poems (and songs), and allows you to recite them a line at a time using a single button press.
Features:
- A on-screen button to easily toggle the Poetical window on or off
- Poems can be selected by means of a list at the top of the window
- Ability to “tag” poems, and then to filter the poem list by a tag
- A way to play any line of the poem, by means of a play button next to each line, which doesn’t lose your current position in the poem.
- An option to add a prefix to all lines in your poem (for example, if you wanted to add a “/f” prefix before each line)
- An option to do an emote in the blank lines between verses in your poems (for example /emote pauses)
- Find-and-replace feature in the poem editor.
- “Pop-out” windows to allow multiple poems to be opened at once.
- A method to add “comments” to your poems that will be ignored when you recite your poems (Useful for doing stage directions if you were doing a play!).
- A “delay” setting for the main play button. After clicking the main play button to read a line, it can optionally stay inactive for a short delay before the next line can be played.
- Command line options to allow Poetical to be opened on a specific poem
- Ability to bookmark a line of the poem . Hop quickly back and forth in long poems
- Ability to colour each line of the poem. Now you can dye your poems yellow! (See notes below)
- Full support for French and German clients
Latest version
Poetical is currently at v1.3.2, released April 2019. You can download it here.
For older versions, look at LOTRO Interface. Any new beta versions will be released here.
Installation
Unzip the zip file, and move the “Simbo” folder to your “Documents/The Lord of the Rings Online/Plugins” folder.
Usage
Poetical can be loaded via the in-game Plugin Manager, or with one of the following command line option
/plugins load poetical
The window visibility can be controlled with the toggle button, or with the following command-line options:
English Client
/poetical show
/poetical show “poem-name”
/poetical pop-out “poem-name”
/poetical hide
/poetical toggle
French Client
/poetical afficher
/poetical afficher “poem-name”
/poetical pop-out “poem-name”
/poetical masque
/poetical basculer
German Client
/poetical anzeigen
/poetical anzeigen “poem-name”
/poetical herausstellen “poem-name”
/poetical verstecken
/poetical umschalten
To bookmark a line in the poem, you can use the Add Bookmark button on the bookmark toolbar. This bookmark toolbar is initially hidden but can be enabled via Settings. Such bookmarks will appear in the Poem Editor window
{{BOOKMARK:Bookmark Name}}A line of the poem that is bookmarked
You can also add bookmarks in the Poem Editor using this syntax.
To colour a line requires to know the six-character hex code of the colour, then entering the code in double-braces at the start of the line. For example:
{{FF6500}} This line will be orange
Alternatively, you can enter use whole numbers (which will be between 0 and 255) to represent the proportions of the red, green, blue values
{{255,101,0}} This line will also be in orange
Version history
1.3.2 (14th April 2019)
- Added a new “Scroll to Middle” option in Settings, to always show the next line in the middle of the listbox
1.3.1
- Fixed a bug where Poetical was incorrectly referencing the Babble plugin
1.3.0
- Added bookmarks bar (Can be enabled using the Settings window)
- Uses more accurate timer for delay setting
- Fix to ensure Toggle button doesn’t disappear outside the screen boundary
- Corrected some translation text
- Fix for resizing window so that current poem is not hidden entirely
- Fix to disable Pop-out button when no poem selected
1.2.1
- Back-up of the plugin file containing all poems (PoeticalPoems.plugindata) is created whenever the Poetical plugin is loaded. Back file is held in the same PluginData folder, and is called PoeticalPoemsBackup.plugindata
- A fix made to the word-wrapping functionality as it was not coping well with longer lines
1.2
- Added a new “filter” text box for searching poem titles. Type in some text to limit the list of poems to ones that contain the text in the poem title
- Word-Wrap setting to allow wrapping of long lines
- Option to reset position to when changing poems rather than remembering previous position
- New “Select All” button in Editor window
- New “Apply” button in Editor window
- Warning if close icon is clicked on Editor window
- Warning if New/Edit Poem is pressed when Editor window is already open to prevent unsaved poem being overwritten
- Fixed bug when pressing F12 when confirmation window visible
- Changed command to use the word “Pop-out” in the French version…
1.1.1
- Fixed bugs with play button and window-resizer
1.1
- Added “delay” setting
- Command options for opening on a specific poem
- Fixed issue with pressing ESC
- UI fixes
1.0 Initial release features
- A on-screen button to easily toggle the Poetical window on or off
- Poems can be selected by means of a list at the top of the window
- Ability to “tag” poems, and then to filter the poem list by a tag
- A way to play any line of the poem, by means of a play button next to each line, which doesn’t lose your current position in the poem.
- An option to add a prefix to all lines in your poem (for example, if you wanted to add a “/f” prefix before each line)
- An option to do an emote in the blank lines between verses in your poems (for example /emote pauses)
- Find-and-replace feature in the poem editor.
- “Pop-out” windows to allow multiple poems to be opened at once.
- A method to add “comments” to your poems that will be ignored when you recite your poems (Useful for doing stage directions if you were doing a play!). Currently if you use “%” at the start of a line, it will be considered a comment. You can change this in Settings though, and it doesn’t necessarily have to be a single character.
Feedback
Simbo would love feedback on the plugin, both of what works and what does not. Please leave yer comments below.
For comments on previous versions, please look at:
The first blog post announcing the plugin.
The blog post with update 1.1.1.
The beta page, where test versions of plugins are released.
Please leave yer comments here!
Hello Simbo, yesterday I had Poetical open when my PC crashed. When I returned, Poetical would not open. I tried repeatedly. It had a parsing error: “… of the Rings Online\Plugins\Simbo\Poetical\Main.lua:114: Unable to parse file!”.
I made a copy of my PoeticalPoems.plugindata folder, then sent it to another player who has more expert knowledge and could find and remove the bad character(s). But although the file showed nearly one megabyte of data, it was null, with nothing available–all lost. Do you, Simbo, know of anything I can do? Otherwise, is there something that could be done to safeguard against this?
My newish PC crashes after several hours in Lotro, and I sometimes have Poetical open, not just in use, but to adjust, copy and paste words. It was just my bad luck to have the PC crash when Poetical was open. I had just added a line of text to a song, but hadn’t saved it.
Thanks for any suggestions! — Hollyberye
Miss Hollyberye!
Eeek! I am sorry that you encountered such a nasty error. It sounds like your PC crashed just as the exact moment the plugin was committing the settings to disk, and it has been corrupted. Do you still have the file, by any chance? I am happy to take a look too, if you don’t mind sending it to me.
One thing I could possibly do, is to get Poetical to create a “PoeticalPoemsBackup.plugindata” file whenever Poetical is first loaded. That way, if your PC crash, you could possibly restore the plugin data from that. You would lose any poems you added before the PC crashed, but at least not all would be lost.
Simbo
Hello,
Today, Poetical doesn’t work anymore.
Here is the message which displays :
”…Online/PluginData/Theundertaker33/AllServers/PoeticalSettings.plugindata:1: unexpected symbol”
” … of the Rings Online\Plugins\Simbo\Poetical\Main.lua:113: Unable to parse file!”
Hullo!
That does not sound good. Unfortunately it looks like your poetical settings file has got corrupted, but I am not sure how that happened. Had you recently changed the settings when this error first occurred?
If you open up the “…/The Lord of the Rings Online/PluginData/Theundertaker33/AllServers” folder, you should see a “PoeticalSettings.plugindata” file. I wonder if you could open that and add the contents as comment?
You could try deleting the “PoeticalSettings.plugindata” file (after taking a back-up copy), and then opening Poetical. This would mean Poetical will revert to the default settings, so you would have to re-enter your settings once Poetical starts.
Hello
First of all thank you for your message.
Later to have made a copy, I deleted the file in question And since it works again.
Thank you again, thanks to you, I am going to be able to be quieter for the concert of my group on The Lord of The Ring Online
Hullo! To anyone who is planning on downloading version 1.3.0 of Poetical, you should hold off for a bit, as a naughty bug found its way into it! A bug-free version 1.3.1 is on its way though!
The new version is up!