5.1. Adding resources to Sophie books

5.1.1 Adding single resource

There are three different ways that media can be added to Sophie. The first is by dragging media from your operating system's desktop (or a folder on your computer) onto the Sophie interface. If you drag media to a page, it will be inserted onto the page, as well as added to the resources; if you drag it to the resources, it will be added to the resources but not inserted on the page. The second way is to use the Import icon, the left-most icon in the Detail View palette of the Resources tab. Click this, then browser to items (or a folder of items) that you wish to import to Sophie. If not all the media can be imported (if, for example, Sophie runs into files that it doesn't understand), you'll see a message about this; everything else will be imported. If you want to import media individually, you can use the Insert menu item. Clicking Insert reveals a number of options: Text, Image, Audio, Video, Audio Record, Book, PDF, HTML, Plain Text, RTF and Browser:

../../images/InsertMenu.png

If you select Image, Video, Audio, PDF, RTF, Plain Text, HTML, or Book, you'll be prompted to locate an appropriate file on your computer using a file dialogue box which looks like this:

../../images/ComplexFileDialog.png

This dialogue allows you to choose how large resources will be imported. Choosing Embed will put the resource into the book file. This is convenient for small media files. Choosing Link will link the resource from the filesystem: this allows linking large resources without making the book size large. When this is selected, Copy to "_files" is available, which will copy the resource to a special directory that will need to be kept with the book. When "Import resource" is clicked, the file will be imported into the current Sophie book.

Insert > Audio Record allows you to record audio; to learn about that, go here.

Insert > Browser Frame will insert a browser frame, which displays a frame in which a browser shows a specific URL; learn more about that here.

The types of media that Sophie currently supports are:

A complete list of the audio/video formats that Sophie supports can be found here. While PDFs can be imported in this release, only the first page will be displayed if there is more than one page in the file. Importing text files (RTF, plain text, or HTML) creates a new text frame with the imported file; to learn more about importing text, go here.

Using the resources tab

When media is imported into Sophie, it is displayed in the resources palette of the resources tab in the right flap; there, it can be filtered by media type. Text in text frames also appears as a resource even though it hasn't been imported into the book. If you check the Advanced checkbox, internal resources in Sophie (the frames on the page, pages themselves, the book object) will also be displayed; generally, you don't want to do this, and this is left unchecked by default.

Resources can also be dragged from the resources palette to another page of the Sophie book. When a frame is deleted from the page of a Sophie book, the resource is not deleted: it remains in the resources, where it can be used again.

Adding multiple resources

You can add multiple resources at once by using the Import Resources button in the resources palette in the right flap. It looks like this:

../../images/ImportResources.png

This will open a file dialogue in which you can choose multiple files, folders, or zip archives to be added to your book. Note that these will not appear on the page, but in the resources palette. After importing, you can drag them from the resources palette to pages of your Sophie book to insert them.