Well I’ve been commenting for a while about the lack of full font support in basic Text generators in FCP.  It can be a real pain when the font you need is one that isn’t available to the plugin.  I noticed that whilst plugs written in FxScript can’t be forced to see and manipulate the full font list, that restriction is not present in the FxPlug architecture ...

... and in version 1.2.2 of the FxPlug SDK they introduced a (very) basic Text parameter.  It doesn’t allow you to type in multiple lines of text but for most on screen text a single line will do anyway, or you can use multiple instances for extra lines.  What you can do though, is create a plain text or even better, a rich text document that you can use as the source for your text generator.  Very cool ... and no, I didn’t figure out the cool bit, that basic principle came courtesy of the example code bundled with the SDK.

So anyway, here presented in all its glory, is a compiled hack of some of that FxPlug example code.

Caveat:  I’m very much a beginner with this Objective -C FxPlug lark so this plugin is offered up very much as a preview release ... I have no idea if it will run on a PowerPC system, don’t know if it will run on anything less than FCP6.0.3, in fact, I have no idea if it will run on anyone’s system but my own.  Still here you go.  If it turns out it doesn't work then it will probably disappear without trace, and if it does work then “Preview Release” been damned, this will probably be gold master!

Install it into the /Library/Plug-ins/FxPlug/ folder, or ~ /Library/Plug-ins/FxPlug/