SB Help

What is a ScreenBook

What is a ScreenBook® Tutorial? For one thing, it is a book, that is, a collection of pages. Screenbooks are numbered collections of web pages.

There is a navigation bar at the top of a screenbook page. The rightmost icon is a "next" icon.

Click on the "next" icon above to go to the next page of this screenbook.

Introduction to Screenbook Maker

You can make your own Screenbooks by downloading and installing Screenbook Maker from Screenbooks.net .

At the present time, Screenbook Maker is only available for the Microsoft Windows platform (98, Windows NT and Windows 2000/XP). Running Screenbook Maker version 1.0 requires Internet Explorer 6.0, but screenbooks created with Screenbook Maker can be viewed with any modern browser, including Netscape and Opera.

Screenbook Maker is a free program. For more information about obtaining Screenbook Maker, go to Screenbooks.net .

How to Create a New Screenbook

To create a new Screenbook, click on Screenbook.

Using Arrows

Here we are back in the Create Tutorial dialog. This time, we are taking screenshots of the very same tutorial that we are making.

Clickless Screenshots

Here is a screenshot showing the Start menu. How was this screenshot taken? If you click on the screenshot button in the Create Tutorial dialog, the Start menu will disappear.

More About the Create Screenbook dialog

In addition to simply entering text for your page, in the input boxes above the text entry pages, you can enter page title, copyright, author, author email and screenshot author.

How to Edit an Existing Screenbook

Editing an existing screenbook is simple. First, in the left pane of the Screenbook Maker main window, right-click on the screenbook you want to edit. A pop-up menu appears. Choose Edit .

More Viewing Options

Screenbook Maker creates three different formats for each screenbook. You can easily switch between these formats in Screenbook Maker.

More Navigation Options

As you've already seen, the slide view of a screenbook has arrows for navigating to the previous and next pages.

Find a Screenbook

The Find feature allows you to search your machine for screenbooks. Find will search through the full text of every screenbook in every bookshelf in the bookshelf menu in the left pane, except for web bookshelves. Screenbook Maker version 1.0 does not search web bookshelves.

Screenshot Slideshow

Screenbook Maker has another viewing mode besides showing screenbooks in the browser window (in the right pane of the main window). You can choose to view the screenshots one by one, with the associated text in a floating window. This mode is useful for classroom presentations, where you are using large screenshots.

How to Send a Screenbook by Email

Sending a Screenbook to someone who also has Screenbook Maker installed is very easy. Right-click on the screenbook title in the left pane to get the pop-up menu. Then choose Send - Send by Email .

Sending Screenbooks to the Web

Once you create a screenbook, you can post it to a website. Screenbook Maker includes an FTP (file transfer protocol) client that can use to send your screenbooks to any web server.

In order to put files on the web, you first must have FTP access to a server account. If you do not already have a server account, you can get one from your Internet Service Provider, or from a hosting provider like www.pair.com. Pair.com has server accounts from $4.95/month.

You will need to know:

Hostname (this is the name of the machine to which you will send your files)
Username (the name used for logging in to the machine via FTP)
Password (also for use with logging in)

Support

Free support via email is available from help@screenbooks.net.

If you are creating screenbooks for a school or other educational institution, you may also be eligible for free phone support. Contact help@screenbooks.net for details.

What is a Bookshelf

Screenbook Maker organizes screenbooks into groups called bookshelves.

Bookshelves are collections of screenbooks that share a table of contents, an index, a common format, and share some common files, such as files for icons.

Making a New Bookshelf

To create a new bookshelf, choose New Bookshelf from the Bookshelf menu.

Bookshelf Options

To view the options for a particular bookshelf, choose Options from the popup menu for that bookshelf.

The Bookshelf Home Page

When you click on a Screenbook Bookshelf in the left pane of Screenbook Maker, the home page for the bookshelf appears in the right pane. This is the page that users will see when they navigate to the URL of a bookshelf that you have posted online.

Creating HTML Help files

Once you have created some screenbooks, you can convert the bookshelf containing those screenbooks into a single HTML Help file, like the Windows 2000 and Windows XP Help files.

Screenbook Files and Folders

Screenbook Maker was designed so that screenbooks could be easily used by other programs. Each screenbook is a folder containing standard HTML and other files. To view the files in a screenbook, choose View in Windows Explorer.

Determining Screenbook Order

In the last tutorial you learned that screenbook Topics and Suptopics are simply folders, and the screenbooks are folders with a collection of files. The name of the folder is the name of the screenbook.

This makes it simple to work with screenbooks via other programs, such as Windows Explorer.

Customizing Screenbooks

You've learned in a previous tutorial that the master file for a screenbook is a file named sbook.xml in the screenbook folder. All of the HTML files for a screenbook are created from this master file.

The process goes likes this:

When you click on the Finish button when editing a screenbook, Screenbook Maker saves the text of the screenbook, and links to the PNG files, into sbook.xml.

Screenbook Maker then looks in the bookshelf file for files beginning with sbx_ and ending with .xsl. These files are XSLT files. XSLT is a language that contains instructions for transforming XML (like the contents of sbooks.xml) into HTML or another format.

For each and every XSLT file that Screenbook Maker finds in the given bookshelf, Screenbook Maker transforms sbook.xml and stores the resulting output in a file with the same name as the XSLT file, but without the sbx_ prefix, and the .xsl suffix. If there is no other suffix in the resulting file name, Screenbook Maker adds the suffix .htm.