Constructing your own version of the timeline visibility demo book

To construct your own copy of this book, download the contents of the book ​here (ZIP file, 144 kb). Unzip the file to create a folder; it should contain 9 images in it. This book should be fairly simple to make; follow these instructions to duplicate the version that can be downloaded, but feel free to play with them and change them as you like.

1. Start up Sophie Author.
2. Create a new Sophie book. Make it 350 x 500; give it whatever title you like.
3. Set the color of the page background: make it blue if you'd like, or whatever color you'd like.
4. Insert a text frame; move it near the top of the page, and enter in the text and style it, using the character HUD. (This isn't very important, obviously.)
5. Go to the resources palette and click the Import button to import the 9 images, named 1.jpg through 9.jpg.
6. Drag the images from the resources palette to the page to create a grid. This doesn't need to be perfect, but if you're a perfectionist, you can set the X offsets to 25, 125, and 225, and the Y offsets to 175, 275, and 375.
7. Now open the page timeline HUD. Set the MAIN value to 9,000. This means that the page will show for 9 seconds before it begins to loop.
8. Open the frame appearance HUD of each of the number frames - except for the 1 frame - and uncheck the visibility checkbox. This hides all but the first frames by default.
9. Now open the timeline flap at the bottom of the Sophie interface. Change the timeline zoom - the drop-down on the left side - to 50 ms or something smaller so that it's easier to move the slider to small values. (If you're having trouble selecting 50 ms, try hitting ENTER after clicking on the zoom; then use the arrow keys to select the right value.)
10. Move the timeline's slider to 1,000 - meaning 1 second.
11. Open the frame appearance HUD for the 1 frame. Uncheck the visibility checkbox. Remember that we left the 1 frame visible at the beginning: this means that when the timeline for the page gets to 1,000, frame 1 will be hidden. You'll see that a change is reflected in the timeline.
12. Select frame 2. For this frame, move the slider to 1,000 and set the visibility on. Then move the slider to 2,000 and set the visibility off. This means that this frame will be shown from 1,000 to 2,000.
13. Repeat this process with the other numbers: make frame 3 visible from 2,000 to 3,000, frame 4 from 3,000 to 4,000, and so on.
14. Finally, preview the book. The numbers should appear in sequence; when the time gets to 9,000, the timeline will loop back to the beginning.

Try your own variations. Notice that each frame's visibility is set entirely separately; you can also make each frame appear and disappear as many times as you want; while the instructions make each number appear just as the one that precedes it disappears, you could make the numbers overlap, for example.