We build programmable text boards - single- and multi-line LED panels, indoor and outdoor, updated over a network, over Wi-Fi or from a stick. They are the least expensive display we make and, for a large share of enquiries from this area, the one that actually answers the question. Below is how we size and hand one over, and what the 512-kilometre distance does and does not add to the cost.
LED scrolling sign in Šempeter — manufacturing, installation, quote
Slovenia · 512 km from our plant in Győr
A running-text board suits Šempeter pri Gorici for a reason particular to the place: most of what has to be announced here is short, factual and changes often - visiting hours at the regional hospital on Ulica padlih borcev, a clinic notice, a pharmacy rota, a road restriction near the Vrtojba crossing, a school event at Osnovna šola Ivana Roba. None of it is video. All of it has to be legible to people who may read Slovene, Italian, or neither with much fluency, and that pushes the design towards very few words in very large characters.
Allow for the language that runs longer
The width is set by the worse case, not the average
The same notice is rarely the same length twice. A phrase that fits comfortably in one language spills over in the other, and a board sized on the shorter version forces every subsequent translation to be mangled or abbreviated. This is the single most common sizing error we see on bilingual boards, and it is permanent. So we ask for one real notice - not a slogan, an actual sentence you have had to display - written out in both languages, and we size the width from whichever comes out longer. That measurement costs nothing at the quotation stage and cannot be recovered afterwards.
Alternate whole frames instead of scrolling two languages
The bilingual case for paging
This is where a bilingual town differs sharply from a monolingual one. A single scrolling line carrying two languages is unreadable in both: the reader tracks movement, arrives mid-sentence and gets half a message twice. Two static frames, each held for four or five seconds, give each language the full width and the full character height. So we configure paging by default and reserve scrolling for a genuinely unbreakable list. It also makes the writing better, because a frame that has to stand alone forces the notice to be short enough to be understood.
Keep the board out of the queue-calling business
What it should not be asked to do
In a building like the regional hospital the temptation is to make one display do everything, and it should be resisted. Calling named patients to a consulting room is a separate system with its own software and its own confidentiality obligations, and a general-purpose text board is not the right vehicle for it. We say so before quoting rather than after installing. What the same board does very well in that setting is the surrounding information: visiting times, a department relocated for the week, a lift out of service, a car park closed for works. Those change constantly, they are read by everyone, and at present they are usually a sheet of paper taped to a door.
Put it where the traffic has already stopped
Junctions, barriers and queues
A board is read properly by someone who is stationary or nearly so. On the approaches to the Vrtojba crossing, at a signalised junction, at a car park barrier, vehicles pause for long enough to take in a full frame; on a free-running stretch of the same road they do not. Choosing the position by where the queue forms is worth more than any increase in size. Send us a photograph taken from the driver's seat at the position, in the hour when it matters. That single image usually settles the argument about size, height and angle before anyone quotes for a bracket, which at 512 kilometres is a considerable saving in itself.
Let the schedule do the work instead of a member of staff
Automatic frames and a handover in writing
Everything the board shows sits in a timetable: morning frames, evening frames, a weekend set, a different sequence on a public holiday. Set once, it runs without anybody thinking about it, and the daily notices are the only thing that ever needs typing. Content reaches it over a network lead or over Wi-Fi, so no cable has to be pulled across a ward or a shop floor. We hand over to two people rather than one, with printed credentials and a single instruction sheet, and we keep copies. A board that has gone silent because one person left is a problem worth an email, not a journey of this length. Cover is one or two years, and the delivery includes spares.
Send it as a consignment and see the road on the invoice
Local fitting against a site visit
The board is small enough to travel as freight and to be mounted by a local electrician from our fixing drawing, and that is how a fair number of these orders are completed. In that case no journey is made and nothing about a journey appears on your invoice. If you want us there for the installation and the commissioning, the trip and the crew's hours are shown as their own lines with the distance named, always separately from the price of the equipment. From you we need photographs, dimensions and your wording; those serve this order alone, and after handover we retain no access to what the board displays.
