Text on Screen

What text on screen does

This shows a short message across your whole screen in the largest text the display will carry, with the colors set by you. It turns any laptop, phone or monitor into a temporary sign: a name at an airport arrivals gate, a "back in ten minutes" note on a shop counter, a message readable from the far side of a room, or a card held up off camera during a live stream. Nothing is installed and nothing is sent anywhere.

How to use it

1. Type your message into the field. Short messages get the biggest text.
2. Set the text and background colors if you want something other than the default.
3. Click the preview, or press F, to go full screen. Press Esc to come back.

About text on screen

Keep it short, because length sets the size

The text is scaled to fill the available space, so every extra word makes all of it smaller. Two or three words read from across a room; a sentence does not. If you need more, split it: show one line, then change it, rather than trying to fit everything at once. A name, a room number, a phone number, or a single instruction are what this format actually carries well.

Contrast, and which combinations survive a distance

Legibility at a distance depends far more on the contrast between text and background than on the size. Black on white and white on black are the strongest, which is why signage defaults to them. Yellow on black is close behind and stays readable in a dim room. What consistently fails is two colors of similar lightness, such as red on green or mid-blue on mid-grey: they may look distinct up close and merge into an unreadable mush at ten metres, and they disappear entirely for a colorblind reader. If it needs to be seen from far away, choose one very light color and one very dark one.

Brightness, glare and the room you are in

Turn screen brightness up for a sign in a lit room, since ambient light washes out a dim display and destroys the effective contrast. In a dark room the opposite applies: a full white background at maximum brightness is uncomfortable to look at and can be harder to read than dark text reversed out. Watch the angle too. Most LCDs shift color and lose contrast when viewed from the side, so a screen laid flat or turned away from the reader performs far worse than the same screen facing them.

Using it on a stream or a call

A second screen showing a large message is a common way to pass information to a presenter without interrupting them, and to show viewers a link or a title without editing anything. Because it is a plain web page, it can also be captured as a browser or window source in OBS and similar software, which is cleaner than filming a physical card and lets you change the message instantly.