An Introduction to Sophie

In the current release of Sophie, saving and opening books doesn't work. However, Sophie can still do many things. This tutorial will walk you through starting Sophie and making a simple book.

To get started with Sophie, you need to download it from the download page. You'll end up with a .zip file; you'll need to unzip that. If you're running on Windows, double-click the file build_run.bat to start Sophie. If you're running Linux, execute build_run.sh. If you're running Mac, things are a bit more complicated: see the installation instructions here for instructions on how to get Sophie running on a Mac.

When you start up Sophie, it will look something like this:

That red rectangle is the book desktop. The book desktop appears behind all books that are open in Sophie.

First, let's make a new book. To make a new book, choose File > New Book. Now your Sophie will look something like this:

Now let's import an image. Right-click this Sophie logo to download it to your desktop - or you might just be able to drag it from your browser to your desktop:

You should have a image on your desktop named SophieLogo.jpg. Go back to Sophie and choose Insert > Image from the menu bars. You'll be asked to find an image; navigate to your desktop and select SophieLogo.jpg. Click OK to import it. You'll have something like this:

One thing you'll immediately notice is that the image is the wrong size: this release of Sophie imports all resources in a frame 280 pixels wide by 210 pixels high. But we can change this. To do this, you need to select the image by clicking on it. The halos will appear above the frame. Halos are an important part of the Sophie interface: they provide access to more complicated functionality right by the object that's being manipulated. There are a lot of halos - you can find out about them in the documentatino? - but the one we want is the frame size and position halo, which is the second halo from the left, the red square being cross by a diagonal arrow. Click on that to open the frame size and position HUD, which looks like this:

Now we're going to change the width and height of the image back to what it should be, which is 137 pixels wide by 62 pixels high.