Hi Maplebar,
These are good questions, questions that I have asked myself, and mostly either solved or determined unsolvable.
There exist actions in VC that allow you to change the font size and foreground and background colors of the user generated osd message. Just type OSD in the first field of an action and you'll see all the actions. Or click the "magic" wand in the LCB and you be able to browse a tree with all available actions. The actions shown will include all the "core" actions and all the actions for whichever plugins you have enabled.
When you are using the OSD.ShowText action, you can specify the position of the text, positive numbers specify the distiance from the bottom of the screen and negative numbers specify the distance from the top of the screen. Since the text displayed can vary in both height and width, depending on the number of lines of text and the length of the longest line of text, it made sense to me to have it centered automatically, and be able to grow vertically from either the top or the bottom of the screen. I hope that works for you.
If you are talking about the OSD messages that are generated by VC automatically when text is recognized, and not the OSD.ShowText action, then yes it's true, you can't really control that right now, and this could be improved.
If you are talking about user generated OSD messages and you want to try something else, you can send your messages to EventGhost and display them there. There are a few more options for placement, and I think you can select which font to use as well.
The VoxCommando OSD text is already "always on top", or at least it attempts to be. Games and certain programs take exclusive control of the screen and there is no way for ANY program to display text on top of them without taking focus away from the program. Great lengths have been taken to avoid stealing focus from other programs, since this would obviously cause lots of problems. If you are using XBMC, you can set it to run in "not true full screen mode" or whatever they call it. I have found that this mode works fine, except if I want to run video in true 24 frames per second. On my system(s), if I want to do that, I need to leave XBMC in "TRUE fullscreen" mode, and OSD messages do not appear on top. If I let XBMC display everything at 60fps refresh rate, then I can leave "true fullscreen" OFF and it works fine, and plays well with others.
We have a similar problem with audio. Certain programs, in certain modes take exclusive control of the system audio and there is no way to play sound on that output. And sometimes, the audio we try to play from VC (TTS anyway) gets spit out later, when that program releases control of the audio (i.e. a the end of the movie, or when we pause). I hate this, but I don't know of any way around it, other than to use a separate audio output for your TTS. I send mine to the TV, and let my music and video play sound through my receiver.
phew, now I'm ready for a nap!
