Teleprompter for Windows, in your browser

Put the window where the webcam is

On a Windows desk the camera is rarely in the middle of anything. It is clipped to the top of one monitor, or screwed to an arm, or built into a laptop lid that is now sitting off to one side of a bigger screen. The script has to end up directly under it.

The reading line lies across the middle of the stage, and the stage fills the browser window, so window height is what decides how far your eyes drop. Make the browser window short and wide, drag it up under the camera, and the words end up a couple of centimetres below the lens. A maximised window on a 27 inch monitor puts them a hand's width lower, and that is visible in the shot.

With two monitors, give the stage the one the camera is attached to and leave the other for the capture software and the call.

Display scaling makes the size number relative

Text size runs from 24 to 96 and starts at 44, and those numbers are CSS pixels rather than millimetres of glass. Windows display scaling at 125% or 150%, a high resolution laptop panel, and the browser's own zoom all change how big 44 actually is. The same setting can be comfortable on a work laptop and too small on the desktop monitor next to it.

So the number does not travel. Do not carry it from one machine to another and do not pick it off a screenshot. Sit where you will sit during the take, press Play, read a paragraph aloud, and move the slider until the words arrive without effort. That takes about fifteen seconds, and it is the one method that still works after you change monitor.

The same goes for a very wide screen. Line length is what you are setting, so on an ultrawide it is usually better to narrow the window than to keep raising the size.

Fullscreen, and the browser's own full screen

The fullscreen control in the dock, and the F key, apply to the stage. The copy below it disappears, the stage grows to fill the display, and the controls travel with it, so you can still change speed without leaving. Come back out and you are on the same line, because the position is held as a share of the way through the script rather than as a pixel offset.

Your browser also has a full screen key of its own. That one hides the browser's toolbars and leaves the page laid out as it was. The two can be combined, and on a monitor beside the camera the combination is a clean black rectangle with nothing on it but your script.

The prompter scrolls a script. It does not record, so your capture setup is unchanged by it. One thing follows from that: if your capture includes the display the prompter is running on, the prompter is in the video.

For a talking-head shot this never comes up, because you are capturing a camera. For a tutorial, a game capture, or anything where you share a screen, it comes up immediately. Capture the specific window or the specific game rather than the whole display, or keep the prompter on the second monitor and capture the first, or read from a phone propped beside the webcam and leave both monitors free.

Keyboard

Ctrl+V pastes whatever is on the clipboard into the script without clicking into the box first, which is how most scripts get here: written in a document, copied, pasted, read. Space plays and pauses, M flips the mirror, F goes fullscreen.

The shortcuts stop working while the caret is in the script box. That is on purpose, so that typing the word "mirror" into a script does not flip the picture halfway through a take. To edit by typing, click into the box or reach it with Tab. And when focus is on a button, Space presses that button rather than starting the roll.

Motion, and the system setting behind it

The motion control has three positions. Left alone it follows what you have asked Windows for: if animations are turned down in the system settings, the script steps line by line instead of gliding. You can override it either way, to smooth scrolling despite the system setting or to stepping without it.

Stepping covers the same distance in the same total time, so it is not a slower setting: the duration estimate holds and the script ends when it said it would. Some people read better off a line that arrives and then holds still than off text in constant motion. On a long script, try it once.

Voice follow, and what happens when a browser cannot do it

Voice follow listens while you read and moves the script to match. Browser support for speech recognition on Windows is uneven, so the control tells you what it found instead of leaving you to discover it mid-take: if this browser cannot do it, the microphone button shows as unavailable instead of failing when you press it. Where the audio goes is stated beside the switch before you turn anything on.

A browser can also report support and then fail once it is running. If recognition drops out during a take, the timed roll takes over at your set speed and the script keeps moving. The voice follow page has the current picture.

Nothing to install, which is often the actual reason

On a managed work machine, installing software is somebody else's decision. This is a page in a browser tab: no download, no account, no admin rights, and no sign in.

The script goes with that. It sits in this browser's local storage on this PC and is never uploaded, and that is the reason it can hold an all-hands script or a number nobody has announced yet. The same fact has a cost: this PC and this browser are the only place it exists, and clearing your browsing data clears it. Keep the original in whatever document you wrote it in.

Reading from a monitor without sounding like it

A desktop monitor sits closer to you than a prompter would, and it is bigger than it needs to be, which tempts people into huge text and long lines. Both make the eye travel visible.

Keep lines short enough that your eyes do not track sideways. Narrow the window before raising the size.
Set the speed near your talking rate, somewhere around 120 to 160 words per minute for most people, and adjust it while reading rather than guessing.
Use the countdown for the first few takes and switch it off once you are starting cleanly.
Recue between takes instead of scrolling back by hand.

The stage itself is on the home page. If the PC is doing the recording and something else should be doing the reading, see iPhone and iPad.