What follows is a practical route through a difficult constraint: how to establish where a programmable text display is even conceivable in this municipality, why putting it behind the glass solves one problem and creates another, why held pages beat scrolling in a protected street, how to size a line for a lane four metres wide, how to agree switching times with the residents above you, and what we supply towards a consent application.
LED scrolling sign in Piran — manufacturing, installation, quote
A scrolling text display is the one product in our range that has to be discussed here with the word no near the beginning. In a protected Venetian town of under four thousand residents, a bright moving message in a lane is out of keeping with the setting, difficult to consent, and unpopular with the people living above the shop long before anybody official becomes involved. That does not close the subject. It moves it: to the inside of the glass, to held pages rather than motion, to the Portorož side where the rules and the neighbours are different, and to a level of output that most suppliers would consider absurdly low.
Ask first where a moving sign is even conceivable here
Three answers, in descending order of difficulty
Work through the positions in order. An external display on a frontage inside the walls is the hardest case and in most streets should be assumed unavailable; treat any other outcome as a bonus rather than a plan. A display inside a shop window, visible through the glass but attached to nothing on the outside, is a far easier proposition and is what most businesses in the core end up with. And on the Portorož side, where the buildings are modern and the street is commercial, an external unit is an ordinary commercial question. Ruling positions in and out at this stage costs nothing and saves months. We have seen businesses design a frontage display, budget for it, and then discover the constraint after ordering. Starting from the most restricted position and working outwards produces a decision you can act on within a week.
Put the board behind the glass and then solve the reflection
Weather stops being the problem and light becomes it
A display inside the window needs no weatherproofing, no fixing into the facade and no external cable, which removes most of the objections at once. In exchange it acquires a problem that outdoor units do not have: the glass reflects the lane, the sky and the building opposite, and on a bright afternoon those reflections can be stronger than the display itself. The remedies are positional rather than technical. Set the unit back from the glass rather than against it so that reflections fall in front of the image instead of on it, angle it slightly downward, and check the reading at the actual time of day when it matters most - late morning in a south-facing window is usually the worst case. A dark surround behind the unit inside the shop lifts apparent contrast considerably. Increasing brightness is the response most people reach for and the least effective one, since it raises the reflection on the glass in almost equal measure.
Rule out motion in the protected streets and use held pages instead
A page that appears, stays and changes, rather than text that travels
Scrolling is what makes a text display conspicuous, and conspicuous is precisely the quality that causes trouble in a historic street and with the flat upstairs. The controller can just as easily hold a complete page of text still for a set number of seconds and then replace it, with no movement at all. Legibility usually improves, because a stationary line is read faster than a travelling one, and the display becomes a changing notice rather than an animated sign. This has a practical consequence for sizing. A held page has to fit entirely in the available width, which caps the message length hard, so wording is edited down rather than allowed to run. Two short lines held for six seconds each communicate more in a lane than one long sentence crawling past for thirty. Where an external position is being sought, offering a static-page mode as part of the proposal is also a more credible starting point than proposing movement and negotiating downward.
Size the line for a lane four metres wide
Short sightlines mean small equipment, not large
In the streets between Tartini Square and the church of St George, nobody reads a sign from more than a few metres. That short distance is an advantage: capitals of three or four centimetres are entirely comfortable at four to six metres, which means a small unit with a fine pitch does the work of something far larger. Pitch in the P2 to P2.5 range is appropriate for a window position at this range; the coarser pitches designed for roadside reading would look crude through glass at arm's length. Count the characters your longest genuine message needs, including the carons on Š, Č and Ž, which need vertical room above the cap height and are the first thing to be clipped on an undersized board. If the business also serves visitors in a second language, count both versions, since a bilingual rotation doubles the demand on the same physical space and is the most common reason a board turns out too small a month after installation.
Agree the switching times with the flats above before ordering
A conversation that keeps the display switched on
Above nearly every shop in the old town somebody lives, and their windows are a few metres from where your display will be. A programmable board glowing into a bedroom at one in the morning is the single most reliable way to have equipment switched off permanently within a year, whatever the original intention. Deal with it before you order rather than after complaints begin. Fix an hour at which the display goes dark, set the evening level far lower than the daytime one, and write both onto the handover sheet so the settings survive a change of staff. Indoor units run at 700 to 800 nits and in a dark lane will still want dimming well below that after dusk. Having the times agreed in advance also strengthens any consent application, because a stated switching regime is a concrete commitment rather than an assurance.
Take our technical annexes and make the application yourself
What we produce, and the decision that is not ours
For anything visible from the public realm within the protected core there is a consent process, and it is more demanding here than in most Slovenian towns. What we provide is the technical file: dimensioned drawings of the unit and its mounting, a visualisation set against a photograph of the actual frontage, the brightness figures for both levels and the switching times, the power draw and the electrical arrangement, and a description of how the unit is fixed and how it would be removed. The application and the decision belong to you and to the relevant authority, and we will not tell you what the outcome will be. What we can say from experience is which elements attract objection - movement, size, external mounting, high output - and which do not, and we will prepare a proposal that starts from the second list. Service is arranged on the same principle: spare modules travel with the delivery, the settings are documented, and most faults are resolved locally rather than by a vehicle covering 530 kilometres.
