Lyric Pro Effects

Unfortunately our station did not do any all out training, the couple of people who got it don't know much about this either other than to "play with it" when it comes to these types of effects.

I am trying to learn how to use the particle based effects such as fire&smoke, glitter, magic trail, etc. I am used to 3d Studio Max or After Effects and I am frustrated by the fact that my "emitter" seems to be the bottom edge of my text box. How can I make my emitter in such a way that I can position it wherever I like? As a workaround I have tried creating a dummy text box and scaling it down in size. But there seems to be an odd problem with the "pivot point" of the emitter. If the text box is in teh center of teh canvas it's more or less alright. As soon as I move the text box to either side the pivot point seems to almost slide on an exaggerated X axis the closer to either side I get the more exaggerated the distance. What the heck?

Here is ultimately what I want to do with the effect. I want the text to wipe on in such a way that it is immeadiately proceeded by the particle trail so that it appears that the particle trails is actually wiping the text on screen. How would I do this? Use a type on effect first, take a dummy text box key frame position and maybe animate some opacity or something? I could slap this together in after effects in like 5 minutes, but in Lyric Pro I am stumped. I want to use my Lyric for more than just a glorified version of Microsoift Word, but there are no tutorials out there for what to do and the station doesn't want to expand it's training to pay for learning how to do such "fancy" things.