Themes

A theme in BibleCast defines how the verse looks on screen — the background, the font, the colors, the lower-third strip for broadcast. Every role (audience, stage, broadcast) picks its own theme independently.

The twenty presets

For the Audience role, BibleCast ships with twenty themes: Sanctuary (blue gradient), Cream Serif (italic on cream), Charcoal Warm, Royal Purple, Sunrise, Ocean, Emerald, Golden Glory, Violet Night, Morning Mist, and more. You'll find them in the right panel under the Themes label.

For Stage and Broadcast, BibleCast applies role-specific defaults tuned to the role (black background for stage, transparent with a lower-third strip for broadcast). You can build custom variants of these, but there isn't a 20-preset set for them.

Quick switching

In the right panel, clicking any theme applies it immediately. If you have more than one role active, the dropdown above the list picks which role you're changing (Audience, Stage, Broadcast). The active theme has a blue indicator on its left side.

The Theme Editor

To create a new theme from an existing one, select it in the panel and click Customize in the Themes header — it makes an editable copy and opens the editor. Each built-in theme also shows a pencil (✎) as a one-click shortcut to Customize it; your own custom themes instead show a ⋮ menu with Edit, Export, and Delete. The editor opens a modal with a live preview of the current verse, rendered at the actual target screen's aspect ratio.

  • Background — Solid (one color), Gradient (two colors + angle), Image (PNG/JPG), Video (a looping motion background, audience screen only), or Transparent (None). Images and videos are copied into the theme's folder so they travel with the profile. Image and video backgrounds can take a tint overlay (color + strength) to keep verse text readable over bright media.
  • Text — color, font (from your installed fonts), outline (halo), shadow.
  • Reference — color, scale relative to the verse, independent alignment or anchored to the text container.
  • Lower-third (broadcast only) — strip background (gradient or image), opacity, height, bottom offset.
Fonts are any font installed on your Mac (Font Book). BibleCast reads each font's native metrics so it can position text correctly — including unusual, liturgical, or custom corporate typefaces.
Transparent (None) background — play a video or motion loop in ProPresenter, OBS, or any video mixer/compositor behind BibleCast, and BibleCast composites only the verse text (plus the reference and lower-third) on top. No chroma key or green screen needed. It applies to the Audience and Stage outputs (broadcast/NDI roles already carry native alpha). A checkerboard appears in previews to signal that the theme is "keyable" — transparent for compositing.

Sharing themes

Themes are portable. A custom theme's ⋮ menu has Export, which writes a .biblecasttheme file via a Save dialog. It's a self-contained bundle — the background image or video and any custom fonts are packed inside, so the theme looks identical on another Mac with no missing files.

The Import button in the Themes header loads one or more .biblecasttheme files at once. Each imported theme is added to your list and briefly highlighted so you can spot it; if a file in a multi-select is invalid, it's skipped and the rest still import.

Layout per role

The theme controls how the verse looks; the layout controls where the verse and reference containers sit on the screen. They're separate. Several layout presets ship in — Standard, Compact, Reference on top, Text left with ref bottom-right, plus lower-third variants for broadcast (Center, Left aligned, Right aligned, Wide band, Compact band, Ref on top). Or drag the containers freely inside the live preview, with Figma-style snap guides for alignment.

Automatic sizing

BibleCast computes the font size for every verse from its length and the target screen's resolution — short verses render larger, long ones shrink to fit without clipping. You don't set a point size.

For the rare font that still overflows (some unusual or custom fonts carry wider metrics than the auto-fit math expects), the Theme Editor has a Font Scale knob as an escape valve: 1.00× uses the auto-fit size as-is, and you can dial it down to 0.50×. It only scales down — auto-fit already targets the largest size that fits.