Bottomline Ticker Settings: Theme, Layout and Speed
If you want a bottomline ticker on your own screen, the closest match in GridTicker takes two settings. Under Settings → General, in the Browser block, set Theme to "ESPN Bottom Line" and Layout to "Single line". Then turn off Stack tickers in rows so everything runs in one strip. That gives you one crawl across the bottom of the screen, a game at a time, the way the broadcast version moves. The rest of this article covers what each of those settings changes, plus the smaller ones for speed, text size and what goes into the crawl.
This is not a walkthrough of reading the scores in the crawl. We already have one: Bottom Line Ticker: How to Read the Scrolling Crawl. For getting it running on a laptop, a TV or a Raspberry Pi, see An ESPN BottomLine Ticker for Any Device. This one is about tuning it.
The two settings that make it look like a bottom line
A new account starts as "GridTicker terminal" with the "TV score box" layout. That is a good look for a monitor, but it is not a crawl. Two controls change it.
Theme
The Browser block on Settings → General has three themes:
- GridTicker terminal, the house look
- ESPN Bottom Line, styled after the broadcast crawl
- Retro LED, an amber look that resembles a scoreboard
Theme only changes the colors and type. You get the same games, prices and headlines in any of them.
Layout
Layout sets how each game is laid out. TV score box stacks the two teams, visitors on top and home team underneath, the way a score bug on a broadcast does. Single line puts the whole game on one line, like the original broadcast crawl. If what you have in mind is a line of scores moving right to left along the bottom of the screen, pick Single line.
You can mix them. ESPN Bottom Line with TV score box is a different look from ESPN Bottom Line with Single line, and both are worth a few minutes on screen before you decide.
One strip or one row per ticker
Stack tickers in rows gives each ticker (sports, stocks, news, flights) a row of its own, each scrolling at its own pace. Turn it off and they share one strip, one after another.
New accounts start with stacking on. That works well on a TV with room for several rows. A bottomline ticker is one line, though, so if you want that, turn stacking off. Scores, then headlines, then your stocks will pass in a single crawl.
If you keep rows, each ticker's height is set under Appearance on its own page. Row height is relative: a ticker at 4 next to one at 2 is twice as tall.
Speed and text size
Scroll speed
Each ticker has its own speed, in pixels per second, so headlines can scroll slower than scores and prices faster. Out of the box, news runs at 40, sports at 60 and stocks at 100. If a crawl feels too fast to read from across a room, slow down the ticker you care about and leave the others alone.
Fit text to the screen
Fit text to the screen sizes the text to the window's height. A thin strip across a monitor and a whole television both get text that fits. Turn it off and set Text size yourself. To make a bottom line, size the browser window as a short bar, or leave it full screen on a TV, and let this setting handle the text.
Pause on hover
Pause on hover stops the strip while the mouse is over it, so you can read a score without chasing it. This helps on a desk monitor and does nothing on a TV with no mouse.
Deciding what goes in the crawl
A crawl that carries everything takes a long time to come back around to your game. The switches under What to show on the Sports page control how much goes in:
- Live, Upcoming and Final turn games in progress, games still to come and finished games on or off.
- Upcoming reaches sets how far ahead upcoming games go, from today only up to the next two weeks. On a crawl, today only keeps things short.
- Favorites first puts your favorites ahead of the rest of their league.
- Favorites only shows only your favorites, league by league. If you star nothing in a league, that league still shows everything.
A few more change how the crawl reads:
- Logos puts a crest beside each team, plus logos on stocks and headlines.
- League dividers places a league's mark where the strip moves from one league into the next, so you can tell when baseball ends and football begins. You can keep the dividers and turn off the crests, or do the opposite.
- Records shows each team's win-loss record beside its name on a game still to come. It starts off.
- Score celebrations, under How each device draws it, turns the big-moment graphics on or off. They cover a home run, a touchdown or a goal. Turn them off if you want the crawl to keep scrolling without interruption.
When the crawl runs
A bottom line doesn't need to run all day. Under When each ticker appears on Settings → General you can give each ticker hours on each screen, for example stocks while the market is open and scores in the evening. A ticker with no windows shows at all times. A window that ends before it starts runs past midnight.
A different look on your phone
Each screen is set up on its own. The Phone block on Settings → General has the same theme and layout choices as the browser. So your TV can run ESPN Bottom Line in Single line while your phone stays on TV score box. A screen you never set up follows the browser.
How GridTicker helps with this
GridTicker is a live ticker of the scores, stocks, headlines and flights you follow. It runs in any modern browser on Windows, macOS, Linux or a Raspberry Pi, with nothing to install. It fits the space it is given, whether that's a bar across the top of a monitor or a whole screen. The settings above live under Settings → General and on each ticker's own page, and the guide explains each one, including what every row on the strip shows. Your settings follow your account, so the crawl looks the same on every machine you sign in on.
To build your own bottomline ticker, set up a strip at app.gridticker.com/signup. Every new account starts with a trial.