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Tom L. Hall President |
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Issue 5
February 15, 2007 |
Welcome to
this issue of my Newsletter. In this issue,
I will discuss a few things related to setting up your authoring
environment. Note that the information
relates to my personal preferences based upon my experiences and how I want
things to work for me.
In this Issue:
Setting the Properties for New Objects
As I have
trained folks over the years, I have found that often even folks that already have
some ToolBook experience don’t know much about the various things you can do to
set up your authoring environment.
- From the View menu, click Options
to obtain this dialog box.
- There are six tabs that allow
you to set up the various authoring options. From the Interface tab, there is one option that is not initially
become checked that I will check, Show
right-click menus at Reader level as shown above. With this checked, I often will do a lot
of “authoring” while at Reader level by just right-clicking over the
object (or page) that I want to work with. If I know that an object is
part of a group, I will choose the Parent
option from the right-click menu and then choose the parent such as shown
below.
- As an option, I would just
choose the Properties icon to get to the Property Editor for the object,
and then use the Edit Parent
option from the tool bar for that editor.
- If Confirm before deleting objects is checked, I will uncheck it
to get rid of that dialog box we would normally get when we try and delete
an object.
- From the Startup tab, I will normally go ahead and add any custom
system books I might be using. I
covered this in an earlier Newsletter (Issue 2, Jan 1, 2007). If you never use any of the options from
the Startup dialog box, then you might want to consider unchecking Show
startup dialog.
- This is a view of the New tab for my setup. I will usually keep all the options checked
as shown below so I get the dialog boxes desired when adding new pages,
new backgrounds or starting a new book.
Likewise, if I am using a specific template book for creating a new
book, I will go ahead and “hook” it up from here.
- This is a view of the Catalog tab. I always leave Show extended properties dialog after adding object to book,
meaning that when I add an object such as a question object, action
object, or media player, I immediately get the Extended Properties dialog
box. If you want to always have the
Catalog open, you would make sure Catalog
is closed when ToolBook starts remains unchecked.
- This is a view of the Backup tab. In an earlier Newsletter (Issue 2), I showed
you how to have a Custom System Book and one option I gave you with my
code was a Compact Book
routine. Many times, I will use
this option to both compact my book as well as to make a backup of my
book, and thus I do not check Always
create backup copy. Likewise,
there are times when I just use the CTRL+Shift+S keystroke
combination instead of the Compact Book routine to compact the book and
make a backup. If you check this Always create backup copy option,
then you also can define how many unique backups to keep.
- This is a view of the Actions tab. I normally take advantage of the
in-place editing features of the Actions Editor and thus check Use in-place editing for all actions. As a result, I do not check Show automatically when adding new actions
by drag and drop. Likewise, I
will check Automatically update
actions when the Actions Editor closes. This eliminates a dialog box that
prompts you to save your actions, thus, one less buttonclick
to get out of the Actions Editor.
Here, it is up to you. If
you like the option of canceling what you might do within the Actions
Editor, then don’t check this option.
An earlier Newsletter (Issue 1) showed you
how to create a Custom Catalog. Here I
will discuss briefly how to control the Categories you view when the Catalog is
open. The installation of ToolBook gives
you access to a number of Catalog Categories but there are many more available
to you. Likewise, there might be
Categories that you never use so it is important to know that you can customize
this view.
- Right-click
over the Catalog title bar and choose Customize Catalog.
- Now,
uncheck those Categories you feel you will not ever use. Scroll up and down the list. Also check any that you think you might
want to have available all the time.
- If
you want to reorder the list of Categories, just click the Category you
want to move up or down in the list and click the appropriate arrow as
shown here. One thing you could
consider doing here is either making the list alphabetical or moving those
Categories you use the most to the top of the list. The main thing is to consider simplifying
the view to only those Categories you think or know that you will use,
bearing in mind that you always are just a few clicks away from adding a
new Category or getting rid of one from the normal Catalog view.
- Click
OK when done.
Setting the Properties for New Objects
Another important thing to consider doing is to preset properties for new
objects such as objects you might draw using the Tool Palette or objects that
you might add from the Catalog.
- Make
sure nothing is selected on a page, and use the Object, Properties
for New Objects command.
- This
is the Properties for New Objects dialog box.
- Notice
the options at the top: New objects in this book or Objects in
new books. Often I will open a blank
book, set my default options, leave New Objects in this book
checked and then close ToolBook. Finally, I would then open the book I
want to work in or start a new book for a lesson.
- Notice
that there are three tabs. From the
Draw tab, I will set my default line style which then controls the
line style for draw objects (rectangles, ellipses, and lines). Likewise, I will set the default Stroke
and Fill color combination I want to use.
In the case above, it is a Black Stroke color and a White fill color.
- From
Font tab, I will set the default font. For instance, if I know that I am about
to work on a project where it has been decided that the primary text fields and buttons
(button captions) will be Arial, Regular, 12, then I
will go ahead and set these as the defaults for any new objects.
- From
the Paragraph tab, I will preset the indents for my text fields if
needed, making sure to set the units to something that I can relate to
easily such as inches in this example.
TCC Publishing, Inc
Internet Address: tomhall1@tcc-pub.com
Phone:
252-758-4590
Fax: 252-758-4590