New Bookshelf

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. Click on "next" above to go to the next page of this screenbook. Or, use the space bar and backspace keys to move from page to page.

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. Running Screenbook Maker version 1.x 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.

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 .

Using Arrows

Here we are back in the Edit Book 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? You can't get a screenshot like this by simply clicking on the screenshot button in the Edit Book dialog as shown before, because when you click on the button, the Start Menu disappears.

More About the Edit Book 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.

Copyrights

In a previous tutorial we've seen how a copyright notice can be entered for each page. You can also set the copyright for an entire book. Instead of a page copyright notice, you get a link to another page which describes the copyright for the Screenbook in detail.

You can choose from a number of popular copyright formats, including the six Creative Commons copyrights.

Adsense

You can easily add Google Adsense to your Screenbooks. Adsense is a program offered by Google that lets you put text or banner ads on your web pages. Google pays you when someone clicks on your ad.

If you have not already signed up for Google Adsense, click on the link below to get started.

Find a Screenbook

The Find feature allows you to search your 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.x does not search web bookshelves.

CSS and Screenbooks

The Edit Book dialog has a pulldown for CSS styles.

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)

Sending Screenbooks to Web II

In addition to uploading Screenbooks from within Screenbook Maker, you can also use a dedicated FTP program like CuteFTP or FileZilla. Using a dedicated FTP program might be preferable when you are uploading a large bookshelf, since dedicated programs offer more control over the upload.

Support

Free support is available is available from inside Screenbook Maker. Click on Help - Support.

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.