2.2. Halos and HUDs
Interacting with Sophie is done with halos and HUDs. Halos are little icons that show up around things in Sophie when you select them. They stay on the screen until you click somewhere else in Sophie. Generally, these halos can be clicked to open a HUD; a few work slightly differently. HUD is short for head-up display. It’s a little window that opens up showing you different things that you can do with whatever you have selected. You can drag a HUD around by clicking on its background and dragging.
Different things in Sophie have different kids of halos. If you select an image on a Sophie page, you’ll see a frame appearance halo, which lets you put images, backgrounds, or drop shadows on the image; a frame properties halo, which lets you control where and how big the image is; a link halo, which lets you turn the image into a link; and an anchor halo, which lets you attach the image to a text flow. If you select a word of text, you’ll see the character halo, which lets you set the font settings for just that word; the paragraph halo, which lets you control how the paragraph that word is in appears; and the link halo, which lets you make that word into a link. Some halos are very specific: you won’t see the link color halo unless you’ve selected a frame that’s a link or text that’s part of a link.
There is limited halo and HUD functionality in this release of Sophie 2 and they are not meant to be used. In particular, it's impossible to close HUDs once they are opened. Some halos and HUDs can be seen, however. They are:
The page halo and HUD
The page halo appears in the upper left corner of every book page, like this:
If clicked on, the page HUD appears, which looks like this:
The page HUD has controls for setting the border and fill of the current page. In this release of Sophie 2, the page's border can be colored and its thickness set (by using the top two controls), but the page fill does not work. If you click on either of the C buttons, you'll see Sophie 2's color picker, which appears at various points in the Sophie interface when colors need to be set:
Color can be set in a variety of ways; click Okay to clear this dialogue.
Frame halos
When a frame is added to a Sophie page and the frame is selected, frame halos are visible. They look like this:
From left to right, these are the increase z-order halo, decrease z-order halo, shadow halo, background halo, and drag handle. Increase and decrease z-order move a frame in front of or behind other frames. These are not currently functional; clicking them will crash Sophie. The shadow halo is to add a drop shadow to the current frame. When you click on this, the shadow HUD appears, which looks like this:
None of these controls work, though clicking on the C will bring up the color picker. If you click on the background halo, the background HUD appears, which looks like this:
None of these controls work, though clicking on the C will bring up the color picker. The one frame halo that works completely is the drag handle: you can drag this to move the frame around on the page.
Text halos
If you enter text in a text frame, the text halos will appear. They look like this:
There are a number of text halos; from left to right they are bold, italic, left justify, right justify, center, fully justify, color text, font settings, and paragraph settings. Bold bolds selected text; italic italicizes selected text. Left justify, right justify, center, and fully justify align the paragraph in which the cursor is currently inserted. Color text allows you to color text; it brings up the color picker. Font settings brings up the font picker, which looks like this:
This allows you to choose different typefaces and sizes for the selected text. Finally, the paragraph settings halo brings up paragraph-level settings, which look like this:
This lets you set the left and right indent of the paragraph, as well as the space above and below the paragraph and the paragraph's linespacing. Note that this HUD will not go away after it is invoked.
