Copyright: Illuminatus V3.00 (c) Digital Workshop 1994-95


About Colour Modes

The video cards fitted in almost all Windows-capable computers provide a range of modes in which to present graphics. These basically set the maximum number of colours available which effects the quality of the images which can be displayed, at the expense of speed and the size of the images created.

Illuminatus will allow you to create a multimedia publication in most of these graphics modes and although some can be created no matter what graphics mode your computer is running in we recommend that you work in the same mode as you intend to publish in to ensure that Illuminatus Preview gives you a correct indication of what your publication will look like. If not Preview can sometimes be better and sometimes worse than the actual result you will get.

Using 256 or higher colours in your publication is always preferable and for scanned pictures, digitised video or sophisticated colours it is essential. In 256 colours your graphics will be much closer to photographic quality than in sixteen colours.

Illuminatus features a special function which recognises when your user is trying to view a 256-colour publication on a 16 colour system and automatically optimises the colours for best effect. However, this can effect the speed of the publication noticeably.

The other difficulty is that 256 colour bitmap graphics can be very big and makes it unsuitable for even reasonably-sized products which are to be distributed on floppy disk.

Stylish effects can still be achieved using mono or sixteen colour graphics, particularly by using bold icon or symbol type images.

What Colour Mode Should I Choose?


About Illuminatus

Illuminatus v3.00

© Digital Workshop 1994-95  -  All rights reserved

Portions of Imaging Technology © JASC Inc 1990-1994

Programmed in Microsoft Visual C, portions in Borland C and Assembler.

Developed and published in the UK by:

Licences & Upgrades

Digital Workshop

19 Parsons Street,

BANBURY

Oxon,

OX16 8LY,

UK

Tel: 01295 258335, Fax: 01295 254590

International Tel: 44 1295 258335, Fax: 44 1295 254590

CIX: join theworkshop or mail theworkshop

Compuserve: GO WINAPG or mail 74431,1160

Internet: techsupport@digitalworkshop.co.uk, sales@digitalworkshop.co.uk

WebSite:


About Master Pages

Illuminatus allows you to save any page to disk as a master page. All the elements and contents of your page are saved with it. See Save As Master Page

The idea of Master Pages is to allow you to lay out elements which you want to use across all or most of the pages in your publication. A typical use for a Master Page would be to hold a background design for the whole publication and a company logo or the motto for the presentation which you want to appear on all the pages. This is very useful for giving the publication a consistent appearance.

If you need a similar page for most of your publication but also require some page designs for which the relevant Master Page is not appropriate these can be inserted and edited individually as required.

Once included in your publication the Master Page can be edited to suit particular page requirements.

Master Pages are also useful to establish consistent colour schemes across a series of pages. Instead of  colouring the same elements repeatedly across a series of pages colour one, then save it as a Master Page. Then insert it again as many time as you require. Even if subsequent pages have some differences it can be quicker and easier to edit a Master Page than to start from a blank page or template.

You can use Copy and Paste to reuse pages in a similar fashion while you remain in the Illuminatus editor although, obviously, these pages are not available to be reused in subsequent publications.

Related Topics

About Templates

Save Page As


About Templates

Page Templates

Page Templates are the bare layouts for pages which are the fundamental building blocks of a multimedia publication. Each Page Template consists of a design of frames (to contain the graphics and text of the publication) and buttons (to control the actions of the publication).

Template Styles

The Page Templates supplied with Illuminatus are divided into various sets. These sets are intended to provide a range of similar style templates allowing you to build a consistent-looking publication easily. Many have also been given titles to indicate possible uses.

User Templates

You can save templates you have edited or created from scratch using the Save Page as Template from the File menu. If you want to be able to show just these templates in the open template dialog box you should give the template a filename with "USR" as the first three letters. This enables the program to display it when you select User Templates from the List Files of Type drop down list.

Publication Templates

Publication Templates are simply collections of page templates allowing you to save the basic design and layout of whole publications ready for regular use. They are ideal for users who regularly publish programs or publications of a similar design - a regular newsletter, a monthly sales report or similar.

In the publication templates supplied with the program only one of each style of template is included in each template. Each page type can then have the common elements and properties defined before saving it as a master page and inserting it again or repeatedly cutting and pasting to build the number of pages required.


Activate When Mouse Over

This options allows you set actions programmed on buttons to happen when the cursor moves over the button rather than waiting for the user to actually press the button.

This can be useful, for example, for popping up a frame with details of what is beneath the cursor.


Add

 select Add... from the Edit menu in Page View.

This command allows you to draw your own frames and buttons on the page. You can either start with a blank page by using Insert Blank Page from the Publication menu in Publication View or you can add frames and buttons to an existing page template.

If you want to use the template you have created in future publications you can save it to disk using the Save Page As Template option in Page View.

Add...Frame

Add...Button


Add...Button

 select Add...Button from the Edit menu in Page View

This option allows you to draw a button anywhere on your page. You can start with a blank page or an existing page or page template.

Once you have selected this option the cursor will change to the Button Drawing Cursor. You should then click on your page at the point where you want the top left corner of your button to be and drag down and to the right until the button is the right size and shape. Note that the size and shape of a selected button is displayed in the status bar at the bottom of your Illuminatus window.

Tip: The crosshairs on the Button Drawing Cursor can be useful for lining things up when drawing objects close to others.

You can resize and reshape the button at any time by dragging any of the eight editing handles which appear around it when it is selected. You can also edit the size and position very precisely by editing the numbers for Top, Left, Width and Height on the Summary of the Button Options dialog.

Illuminatus currently allows a maximum of 25 buttons on any one page.

Add...Frame


Add...Frame

 select Add...Frame from the Edit menu in Page View

This option allows you to draw a frame anywhere on your page. You can start with a blank page or an existing page or page template. Once you have selected this option click on your page at the point where you want the top left corner of your frame to be and drag down and to the right until the frame is the right size and shape. Note that the size and shape of a selected frame is displayed in the status bar at the bottom of your Illuminatus window.

You can resize and reshape the frame at any time by dragging any of the eight editing handles which appear around it when it is selected. You can also edit the size and position very precisely by editing the numbers for Top, Left, Width and Height on the Summary of the Frame Options dialog.

Illuminatus currently allows a maximum of 25 frames on any one page.

Add...Button


Align

 select Align from the Edit menu in Page View

This option allows you to ensure that buttons and/or frames line up neatly. You select a number of frames or buttons by holding down Shift and clicking on each of the items required. The eight black editing handles appear on each object to show they are selected.

You can now select one of the options to align the frames neatly to top, bottom, left or right.

Left

Right

Top

Bottom

Centre Vertically

Centre Horizontally


All Files

This is a special function in slideshows which allows you to tell Illuminatus to create a slideshow from all the files available in a directory when it runs. This is different from the Add All button which simply loads all the files in the current directory into the current slideshow.

This enables you to change the files in the directory at any time and not have to rework the slideshow. It is particularly useful for creating PhotoCD slideshows.

Slideshows


AutoStart

This option allows an action, slideshow, video, sound or animation to take place automatically without any interaction from the user.

This can also be useful reporting text to disk to track a user's progress or create a bookmark.

It can be used with the Delay option to make things happen automatically after a certain amount of time.


Bottom

 select Align...Bottom from the Edit menu in Page View

Selecting this option will align the bottom edge of all selected frames and/or buttons with the bottom edge of the object lowest down the page.

Left

Right

Top

Centre Vertically

Centre Horizontally


Browse Dialog

This is a standard Windows File dialog which allows you to find and open a file for use in the program.

Select the type of file you are looking for from the List Files of Type dialog if appropriate. The files available will vary depending on where in Illuminatus you are using the Browse dialog.

If necessary change to the drive where the file is by selecting the letter for the disk drive from the drop down list box labelled "Drive".

Select the directory by clicking on it in the list box labelled Directories.

Then select the file itself from the list box labelled File Name:


Button Options

Double-clicking on a button brings up this set of dialogs which allows you to assign actions to buttons. You can use buttons to move around the publication or to launch events. Buttons can be thought of as the actions of your publication conveniently packaged as buttons. Think of them as commands, some can be set for the user to command others can be set to autostart and therefore effect something automatically. They can also be delayed so that they can synchronised with other events or create timed actions.

Pile buttons on top of each other to create multiple actions. For example, to make a pop-up frame appear for a set length of time put a second button under the first which hides the frame which the first button shows. Then simply set the delay on the second button to the length of time the frame should be displayed.

Click on the item you would like further information on.

Several of the options available for buttons are mutually exclusive - you can only use a button to perform one main action. These are the primary actions and are represented by round radio buttons on the Summary page. There are additional, secondary actions which a button can be assigned at the same time as one of the main functions and those are indicated by a square checkbox. Thus a single button could, hide a frame, stop the animation running on the current page, play a fanfare and move onto the next page which enables you, in particular, to close down the current page successfully.


Button Options: Graphic

This option allows you to choose graphics to create graphical buttons. There are three button states: up, down and when the mouse is over the button but hasn't clicked on it, called highlighted. You can set a graphic for any or all of these by clicking on the large square box labelled Up Graphic, Highlight Graphic or Down Graphic, as appropriate. To tell Illuminatus you want a highlighted button click the Enable Highlight checkbox.

Then use the file list boxes at the bottom of the dialog to find the files you want and then click on the image to be used. It will appear in the box above to show you which one you have chosen.

It is up to you whether you have graphics for all the options. The highlight option, in particular, may not be appropriate. you do not need to set graphics for any state which is equivalent to setting the Invisible option and will make the button invisible though still functional.

If you change your mind about the image you want to use simply select another one or click the Clear button to empty that button state.

You can switch between a graphical button and a standard default one by clicking the Graphical Button checkbox on the Summary page on and off.


Button Options: Launch

This section of the Button options allows you to instruct a button to launch another program. This could be another Illuminatus publication in a series or daisy chain publication. It could be an extra utility (such as using the calculator in the Catalog example provided with Illuminatus) or it could be the application you are providing training on so the user can test out what they have just learnt.

This is also the function which enables you to extend Illuminatus with ILX extensions. You launch your chosen extension which performs the additional function for you and then either simply drops back into your publication or relaunches your publication giving it a page number to jump to, as a parameter if required. For further details Extension Programs  or ILX Help File.

Type in the filename of the program you want to run or use the file list boxes to find it and then click on the Add File As Launch button.

If the program needs a parameter or you want it to start with a particular file you can include this in the With Parameter box. If you want these files distributed with your publication you can check the Distribute Files option.

You can choose whether Illuminatus closes down after it has launched the program by selecting Close Publication; if  you want Illuminatus to continue running in the background you should leave this option unchecked.

Don't forget that to include these programs in your multimedia publication you must have a licence to do so or the program and associated files must be public domain.

About Pathnames


Button Options: Report

This section of the dialog allows you to set up the options for reporting information to disk or to the printer via a text file.

Type the text you want to store in the large box provided and type the filename (and pathname if appropriate) into the box at the bottom. (See Pathnames  for further information.)

When the user presses the button the text you have typed in will be stored on disk in the file you have specified. You can ensure that this starts a new file by clicking the Overwrite radio button on or you can choose to add this to an existing file by clicking the Append option on.

You can print the text by clicking the Print File radio button on. This will print the whole file which you have detailed in the filename box.

Users can provide the text to be reported to disk via frames which have been set to accept text input. You can store this on disk by selecting the Text Input option here. There is no need to give a text filename in this instance as this is set up on the Frame options dialog.


Button Options: Sound

This section allows you to setup a sound file for the button to play. Use the file list boxes at the bottom of the dialog to locate a WAV or MID or RMI file to play.

The sound file can play when the button is clicked and/or when the mouse cursor moves over the button and/or off the button by checking the appropriate checkbox(es) at the top of the dialog.

You can only play one Midi and one WAV file at once but if you want to stop a Midi file when you're launching a WAV file or vice versa you can click on the checkbox to Stop Existing Sound.

You can set the file to play repeatedly by clicking the Loop checkbox on.


Button Options: Summary

The Summary on the front of the dialog allows you to set the actions for buttons and to switch the options on and off conveniently.

Several of the options available for buttons are mutually exclusive - you can only use a button to perform one main action. These are the primary actions and are represented by round radio buttons on the Summary page. There are additional, secondary actions which a button can be assigned at the same time as one of the main functions and those are indicated by a square checkbox. Thus a single button could, hide a frame, stop the animation running on the current page, play a fanfare and move onto the next page which enables you, in particular, to close down the current page successfully.

Click on the picture for further details.


Caption

Type the caption for the button in the Caption box provided. Unlike normal buttons the caption can be more than one line.

You can use captions on graphical buttons though they do not go down on the down graphic as there is no way to automatically establish how far it would need to go down (if at all).

The caption is always displayed in the standard Window's system font.

You can type in the text formatting codes

You can, of course, take the graphic of the buttons into a paint package and add a caption in the font, position and colour you want. This also enables you to create a caption which drops on the down graphic.


Centre Horizontally

 select Align...Centre Horizontally from the Edit menu in Page View

This function lines all the currently selected objects along a horizontal line through the centre of each as illustrated...

Selecting Multiple Objects

Left

Right

Top

Bottom

Centre Vertically


Centre Vertically

 select Align...Centre Vertically from the Edit menu in Page View

This function lines all the currently selected objects down a vertical line through the centre of each as illustrated...

Selecting Multiple Objects

Left

Right

Top

Bottom

Centre Horizontally


Change Data Drive

 select Data Files from the File menu

This option allows you to change the drive where Illuminatus will look for the data files and resources used in your publication while retaining any directory or subdirectory information.

If you have copied a publication from one drive to another for example, or if you are trying to edit a publication on your hard drive (C:) which is expecting all your resource files to be on a CD Rom in your drive (D:) or vice versa.

Resources & Data Files

Check Location

Consolidate Project


Change Graphics File Extension

 select Data Files from the File menu

This allows you to change the file format of graphics referenced by your Illuminatus publication without having to manually reload new images into the publication. So, for example, if you originally included PCX, TIF and JPG images in your publication but decide to keep all your graphics files in JPG format to save disk space you can convert the files themselves using Paintshop Pro or a similar package. Then you can use this option to tell Illuminatus to change the references to all PCX and TIF files to reference JPG files instead.

This is particularly useful for customers who have used GIF and versions of the TIFF format in previous versions of Illuminatus. For legal reasons Illuminatus no longer support GIF file format or the version of TIF which is compressed using the LZW compression method as these are subject to a patent enforced recently. GIF has been replaced by PNG which Illuminatus does support.


Check Location

 select Data Files from the File menu

This option allows you to check that all the graphics, text, animations, sound and video files used in your publication are where Illuminatus expects them to be and have not been deleted or lost. If they are not your publication will have blank or partially blank frames and pages (these will often appear black).

When you run this option Illuminatus checks the links with the files and lets you know if any can't be found. If the file is missing Illuminatus asks you if you want to reassign the file. You can then either locate the original file or find another file to replace it.

Press Skip to ignore the current file, or Clear if you do not want it associated with the publication anymore. Press Abort to stop the Check Location process. Any changes made to that point will still be performed.

Resources & Data Files

Change Data Drive

Consolidate Project


Close Publication

 select Close Publication from the File menu

Closes the currently selected publication. If the publication has been changed since it was last saved you will be given the opportunity to save it. Before closing your publication you may want to to use the Save Compressed option to reduce the disk space your publication uses up while still leaving it editable.


Closedown

This option allows you to program a button to close down your publication. The publication will close in the way set up in the Closedown option of the Publication Options. See Publication Options: Closedown


Commands

A comprehensive guide to all the commands and functions in Illuminatus.

GENERAL

Tools

Picture Editor

Word Processor

Sound Editor

Setup Tools

Window

Help

PUBLICATION VIEW

File

New...

New Publication

New Publication from Template

Open Publication

Save...

Save Publication

Save Publication As

Save Compressed Publication

Save All Publications

Save Publication As Template

Close Publication

Data Files

Check Location

Change Data Drive

Consolidate Project

Change Graphics File

Print

Printer Setup

Summary Info

Preferences

Exit

Edit

Cut

Copy

Paste

Delete

Select All

Deselect All

Edit Selected Page

Publication

Publication Options

Installation Setup

Insert Blank Page

Insert Page Template

Insert Page

Insert Master Page

Compile

Publish

Preview

PAGE VIEW

File

Save...

Save Publication

Save Publication As

Save Compressed Publication

Save Page As

Save As Master Page

Save Page As Template

Save All Publications

Export Page

Print

Printer Setup

Return to Publication View

Edit

Add

Frame

Button

Delete

Move

To Front

To Back

Align

Top

Bottom

Left

Right

Centre Vertically

Centre Horizontally

Page

Zoom 50%

Zoom 100%

Zoom To Fit

Next Page

Previous Page

First Page

Last Page

Preview


Compile

 select Compile from the Publication menu [image] F8

This is the function which allows you to build a finished and independent copy of the publication onto your own hard disk. It is useful when creating presentations which will be viewed on the same computer they were created on (e.g: rolling demos) and for testing the true functionality of the publication (the Preview option within the Illuminatus editor works very differently and is, in particular, a great deal slower than the final version of the publication).

If you have not saved your publication you will need to do so. You will also need to give your multimedia publication a title before you Compile or Publish it.  (See Installation Setup for details.) This is not the same as the filename for the publication it is the title used in the menu bar and is required by Illuminatus to set up the data for your publication. Illuminatus will remind you about these two requirements if you try to publish or compile without them.

You should always compile to a separate directory. Do not compile to the same directory you have saved you publication in. You might like to set up a Compile directory and compile all you publications into subdirectories of that.

Compile also copies across files you have asked to distribute using the Programs option on Installation Setup. So if your program requires text files or data files so that you can check launching and text reporting features you should include them as described in Installation Setup

 Step-by-Step Compile

Related Topics

Publish

Installation Setup

Publication Options

Preview


Consolidate Project

 select Data Files from the File menu

This invaluable option allows you to quickly pull together all the components of your multimedia publication and store them in a single place alongside your editable Illuminatus file.

When you select this option a File Save dialog appears and allows you to choose a filename directory for your consolidated project. Usually these will be the same as the current filename and directory but you can move and/or rename your whole project by typing a different directory or filename in the dialog which appears.

Once you've clicked on OK Consolidate Project will gather together all the resources used in the project and put them into the same directory as the Illuminatus editor file (*.MPB) as selected via the File Save dialog. It will then reassign all the references in the publication to the new location. Illuminatus includes any files referenced in the publication whether they are actually used in the publication or not. This ensures that if you switch a slideshow back on all the files it needs will have been consolidated and you won't have to start all over again.

Once you've consolidated your project you can then safely delete any working files not copied to the consolidation directory in the knowledge that you didn't use them.

Check Location

Change Data Drive


Contents

Now Anyone Can Make Multimedia

ORDERING THE FULL VERSION

READ THIS FIRST

The latest information including details of features added since the manual went to press.

New Features

A brief introduction to features new in this version.

What Can Illuminatus Do for Me?

Introduction to multimedia publishing and the opportunities Illuminatus offers.

Quick Start

A brief overview of how Illuminatus works.

Step-by-Step

Guides to how to perform certain actions or achieve certain effects.

Hints & Tips

Tips for using Illuminatus and answers to technical problems.

Reference Guide

A complete reference of functions and commands


Copy (Page View)

 select Copy from the Edit menu	  Ctrl + C

Copies the currently selected buttons and/or frames leaving the originals in the current publication and stores the copy on the Windows clipboard ready to be pasted back into a new position. All the information associated with the objects is copied.

Related Topics

Cut

Paste


Copy (Publication View)

 select Copy from the Edit menu	  Ctrl + C

Copies the currently selected page or pages leaving the originals in the current publication and stores the copy on the Windows clipboard ready to be pasted back into a new position or a new publication if required.

Related Topics

Cut

Paste


Creating Your Publication Efficiently

Experience has told us the following process is the most efficient way to create a publication using Illuminatus.

1: You will need to have a fairly good notion of the publication you want to create before starting out. With projects involving lots of pages and buttons it will be useful to have a definite plan for the publication. It will probably help to break the publication down into sections with a menu page for each section and subsection.

Things you will need to consider are the resources you have available, the maximum number of buttons you will need the number and position of frames, the size of resources you want to use.

2: Select or create a basic page design which is best suited to the bulk of the pages you want to use.

3: If required select or create an appropriate Cover/Contents and other primary page which looks and works consistently.

4: Build one copy of each page design you will be using into a new publication. These will be your master pages.

5: Create everything which will be consistent across your entire publication. This will probably include:

a background colour or graphic for the whole page,

a background colour or graphic for frames,

a company logo/motto and/or title for the publication,

borders for frames,

also create anything which will be consistent across the majority of your publication.

an Exit button,

a button for a particular page which needs to be reached from most other pages (e.g: contents or index),

hotspots,

hide buttons and frames you are not using on most pages.

You should also create sample text in the frames and set up the font, alignment and colour you will be using most consistently. This means that for every new page you create you will only need to edit the text and possibly font size rather than repeatedly selecting font and colour.

6: Once you have edited the pages save them to disk as pages or as master pages.

7: Insert as many copies of your half-finished pages as you need and you are already half-finished.

8: Rename the pages to ensure there is no confusion. Ensure that any page you are connecting a button to has its final title.

9: With any publication over a few pages it is as well to divide it up into sections. Complete each section individually before moving to the next. Link it to a button on a contents page.


Creating an Index for Search

When you have used a button in your publication to provide a Search function in your publication Illuminatus automatically generates an index of keywords in your publication and the pages on which they appear. When you comes to Compile or Publish your publication you can edit this index of keywords by pressing the Setup Keyword List button on the bottom of the dialog.

This brings up the following dialog..

The dialog basically allows you edit two lists of words, those which will appear in the index when a user runs a search and those which are excluded. You can select words in either list by clicking on them and/or using Shift to select blocks of words and Ctrl to make multiple selections. You can then click the arrow buttons to transfer them to the other list. The Add All and Remove All buttons are provided for wholesale resetting of the list.

Illuminatus automatically creates an index of all the words in your publication to get you started. These can then be filtered using our Exclusion Dictionary which excludes word like "the", "a", "in" etc. by checking the box provided and clicking the Apply Filtering button. You will notice you can also ignore words under a given length or which are repeated frequently by typing the appropriate numbers into the boxes provided. Again you need to click the Apply Filtering button for the change to take effect. The filtering merely moves the offending words into the exclusion list from where you can put them back into the index if you want.

If you want to edit the page references of keywords already in the index simply click the Allow Editing checkbox. The Page Reference box will fill with all the page titles in the publication, highlighting those which are associated with the keyword. You can then edit these references by selecting or deselecting these references.

You can add words which don’t appear in your publication by typing them into the box beneath the Master Index list and then adding the Page Titles you want associated with this word in the box underneath (Allow Editing must be on). When you have finished click the Add button to include the word and page references in the index.


Cut (Page View)

 select Cut from the Edit menu	  Ctrl + X

Removes the currently selected page or pages from their place in the current publication but stores them on the Windows clipboard ready to be pasted back into a new position or a new publication if required.

Related Topics

Copy

Paste


Cut (Publication View)

 select Cut from the Edit menu 	 Ctrl + X

Removes the currently selected page or pages from their place in the current publication but stores them on the Windows clipboard ready to be pasted back into a new position or a new publication if required.

Related Topics

Copy

Paste


Data Files

This option allows you access to a submenu provided for reorganising the links between your Illuminatus publication and the resources used in it.

Resources & Data Files

Check Location

Change Data Drive

Consolidate Project


Default Transparent Colour

 select Publication Options from the Publication menu

This allows you to set up the colour which will be used for making graphics transparent unless you change it for particular graphics in the places provided. The current colour is previewed in the box and you can change it by clicking on the Set Colour button which brings up a standard Windows colour selector dialog from which to choose.

Note: For technical reasons you should only pick colours which are solid in 256 colour mode and not those represented by a series of different coloured dots (dithered).


Delay

This option allows you make events wait for a specified time before occurring. This is useful for delaying actions so that they coincide with another event. You can also use it to have events start automatically at a time later than when the page is first opened.

It is also useful when used with buttons to create timers for events. Use a second button underneath the first and set this button to stop whatever the first button started and then type in a Delay and you create an event which will last the specified time.

Simply type in the number of seconds or tenths of seconds you want the delay to be and then click the checkbox on to use the delay.

AutoStart


Delete

 select Delete from the Edit menu.	Delete

Deletes the selected item(s) completely from the publication.

In Publication View it deletes selected pages.

In Page View it deletes the button(s) or frame(s) you have selected. A dialog will ask you to confirm that you want to delete the objects.


Deselect All

 select Deselect All from the Edit menu

Quickly deselects all the pages you currently have selected.

Related Topics

Selecting and Moving Pages


Distributors

For price and availability of the full version of Illuminatus in your area please contact your nearest distributor (at one of the addresses given below). If you experience any difficulty getting your copy of Illuminatus please contact Digital Workshop direct.

ILLUMINATUS - Order Form

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Drawing Frames and Buttons

To add frames or buttons you select Add|Frame or Add|Button from the Edit menu or click on the appropriate button on the toolbar. You then click on your page where you want the top left corner of your frame or button to be and then drag down and right until the object is the right size and shape before releasing the mouse button.

Related Topics

Add

Frame

Button

Delete

Move

To Front

To Back

Align

Left

Right

Top

Bottom


Edit (Page View)

This menu provides functions for creating your own page designs or editing existing ones It enables you to add frames and buttons, to align them and to order the layering of overlapped objects by bringing selected objects to the front or moving them to the back

To perform any of these options simply select the object(s) required (Use Shift+Click to select multiple items) and then choose the appropriate function or click on the relevant button on the toolbar if one is available.

Commands

Undo

Redo

Cut

Copy

Paste

Paste in Original Position

Add

Frame

Button

Delete

Move

To Front

To Back

Align

Left

Right

Top

Bottom

Centre Vertically

Centre Horizontally

See Also

Editing Page Elements


Edit (Publication View)

This menu allows you to perform all the standard Windows editing functions on your selected page(s). It also allows you to switch to Page View for editing of your Illuminatus page.

Cut

Copy

Paste

Delete

Select All

Deselect All

Edit Selected Page


Edit Selected Page

 select Edit Selected Page from the Edit menu.	Enter

Switches the program to Page View to allow you to edit the elements on a page. If you have more than one page selected Illuminatus will go into Page View with the first page in your selection.

Related Topics

Frame Options

Button Options


Editing the Page Contents

To edit the contents of frames, buttons and whole pages you simply double click on the appropriate element or press the Enter key when the object is already selected and then select the tab for the option you wish to edit.

Page Options

Frame Options

Button Options


Exit

 select Exit from the File menu	Alt+X

Closes the program down, giving you the option of saving any publications which have changed.


Export Page

This function allows you to export a full size copy of your page to a disk-based bitmap graphic file so that you can edit it or cut out portions using a paint program such as Paintbrush. If you are running in 256 colour mode the exported graphic will be a 256 colour graphic. If you are running in 16 colour mode the graphic will reflect that.

When you run this option you will be presented with a standard file save dialog. Use the drive and directory list boxes to find the location where you want the page save and then type the filename for the file into the File Name box.

Useful hint

One use for this is to quickly turn text into graphics. Export the page and then cut out the pieces of text and save them as graphics. You can then use these graphics of your text to create text slideshows and other standard presentation effects. You can temporarily give the relevant frame a border for reference when you come to cut the item out.

Another simple use for this is to flip or invert a piece of the background texture or to draw a white line around the top left and black around the bottom and right to create and embossed or inset look to a frame.


Extension Programs

You can extend Illuminatus to do anything you want by linking it with Extension programs. These are programs which add specific features to Illuminatus in a modular way so that the basic program remains uncluttered and you don not distribute functions you do not need.

Several ILX extension programs are provided with the program and full instructions for using them are provided in a separate help file. They provide functions to swap pages while your publication is running, keep scores, play your pages randomly and make conditional jumps around your publication. (Click here for the ILX Help File.) We have tried to design them so you can just use them without having to set any/many parameters and they will work. Some will need specific text files created by other buttons in your program but we've made it as simple as possible. The full range of parameters are also there for greater control when you become familiar with using them.

If you are a programmer yourself then you can create extension programs in any Windows programming language. If you are not a programmer then you simply buy in the module you need from ourselves or from other third parties and concentrate on the part of the multimedia publishing process you want to.

Extension programs can be launched using the Launch Program function and can either run over the top of your publication page or can replace it. If you want the extension program to return you to a certain location in your publication you should close the publication when the extension program is run (Select Close after Launch on the Launch dialog) and then, when it is finished, it should run your publication with the title of the page you want displayed first passed as a parameter. For example to go to the Contents Page of a publication with the filename catalog.exe your extension program would close down by issuing the command... catalog.exe contents

Ideal uses for this function are search programs, order programs, specialised picture viewers, scoring programs and printing programs. Several of these are available from Digital Workshop at a small extra charge.

Important Note: The most common error when using extension programs is not getting the pathname right when the project is published. For further guidance see Pathnames

See Also

Launching Other Programs


File (Page View)

This provides access to file and program management options such as file loading and saving functions, printing with reference to the current page.

Save...

Save Publication

Save Publication As

Save Compressed Publication

Save Page As

Save As Master Page

Save Page As Template

Save All Publications

Export Page

Print

Printer Setup

Return to Publication View


File (Publication View)

This provides access to file and program management options such as file loading and saving functions, printing and  program preferences.

New...

New Publication

New Publication from Template

Open Publication

Save...

Save Publication

Save Publication As

Save Compressed Publication

Save All Publications

Save Publication As Template

Close Publication

Data Files

Check Location

Change Data Drive

Consolidate Project

Change Graphics File

Print

Printer Setup

Summary Info

Preferences

There is then a list of the four publications you used most recently which provide a shortcut way of opening those files. Simply select on the one you want.

Exit


First Page

 select Next Page from the Page menu.	Home

Takes you to the first page in the current publication.

You can use the Home key as an shortcut/alternative.

You can also move to any page in your publication by selecting its title from the drop down list box in the toolbar in Page View.

Related Topics

Zoom 50%

Zoom 100%

Zoom To Fit

Next Page

Previous Page

Last Page

Preview


Fonts

Illuminatus supports True Type fonts and so allows you to use any font you currently have installed under Windows. There is no need to restrict your choice to those you think your readers will have or to distribute the fonts with your publications as Illuminatus automatically converts them to graphics when you compile or publish your document.

The exception to this is text displayed in scrolling text boxes which will need to find a font at run time. If the font you have chosen is not available the publication will find the nearest match so your text will still display but its appearance may be different.

When selecting fonts with which to display text you should think about the manner in which they will be read. Small sizes and fancy typefaces will probably not work well when displayed on screen; they are particularly unsuitable for rolling demos where the message must get across quickly. As with all publishing it is advisable to limit yourself to one or two typeface styles in any one document as this give the publication consistency and coherence.

Text


Frame Border

You can give your frame a border in one of several different styles by selecting it from the drop down list of those available. The current version of Illuminatus includes the following.


Frame Options

Whenever you double-click on a frame you call up this set of dialogs which allows you to setup the contents on any frame. Frames can contain text, graphics, animations, video or slideshows. A frame can contain all these elements although you cannot run a slideshow, video and/or animation at the same time, whichever is launched last will overplay the other.

Click on the item you would like further details on.

Related Topics

Text

Graphics

Slideshows

Animations

Video


Frame Options Background
Frame Options: Background

You can add a background colour to your frame. Clicking on the Palette button brings up a standard Windows colour-selection dialog from which you can choose any of the ready-made colours or create your own by clicking on the Define Custom Colours button.

You can also load a picture in any of the supported graphics formats by using the file list boxes at the bottom of the dialog to find it on your disk.

Checking the Scale to Fit option will resize the picture to fill the background, with the Keep Aspect Ratio option checked the picture will not be stretched out of proportion in order to make it fit. The scale to fit option is not relevant for vector format pictures such as .WMF.

The background picture can be a texture, an illustration or a graphic which designs the publication in a certain way. It can also be Transparent in which case a chosen colour in the picture will be ignored and the background will show through this will allow you have an irregularly-shaped graphic. You can set this colour by clicking the Set Colour button and choosing from the palette which comes up.

Transparent


Frame Options: Animation

You can assign an animation or video clip to play in an Illuminatus frame by selecting the relevant file using the file list boxes at the bottom of the dialog. You can load a FLI or FLC animation, an AVI video file or an MPEG movie. The latter needs specialist hardware to be replayed.

As with most elements in Illuminatus you must give the resource a title by which it is known throughout the program. This can be up to 25 characters long and can contain spaces to allow you to give it a descriptive name.

The animation can start up immediately the page is opened using the AutoStart option.  Whether it is launched by a button or automatically it can be synchronised with a later event using the Delay option.

The Scale to Fit and Keep Aspect options only apply to AVI and MPEG files and not to animations

If you want the file to play continuously you can set the Loop option on.

One of the special new features in Illuminatus 3 is From CD which allows you to tell your publication to load the animation or video from CD. This allows you to install your publication to your user's hard disk to run it at its fastest but leave the movie files on CD so that they don't require massive amounts of hard disk space. There is no need to be concerned that the user may have their CD Rom drive installed on a different letter to the one you've set up because with this option Illuminatus finds the first CD Rom drive on the system automatically.


Frame Options: Slideshow

You can set up a slideshow to play in any Illuminatus frame. This feature allows you to setup a series of bitmap graphics to appear at intervals of your choice.

As with other tab dialogs you can search for the pictures you want using the file list boxes at the bottom of the dialog. you can then add these to your slideshow by clicking the Add button or simply by double clicking on the file required. If you want to add all the files in the current directory click the Add All button.

There is a special option <All Files> which instructs your publication to automatically search for all the image files in the directory when it runs, and display those in the slideshow. This allows you to change the list of graphics available in that directory and not have to recreate the slideshow. Obviously the graphics you require must be in the same directory on your user's computer. This is particularly useful for creating slideshows of PhotoCD images as they are always in the same directory on the CD.

The Delete button removes selected files. The Up and Down buttons move the selected file up or down in the slideshow.

Slideshows can consist of only one picture and so (with the Delay option) allow for timed display of single elements on your page.

A slideshow can be launched by a button and/or can start automatically by checking the AutoStart option.

The slideshow can be made to fit each picture into the frame by using the Scale to Fit option and can retain the original proportions using the Keep Aspect option.

One of the special new features in Illuminatus 3 is From CD which allows you to tell your publication to load the graphics for the slideshow from CD. This is useful if you have large slideshows as it allows you to install your publication to your user's hard disk to run it at its fastest but leave the image files on CD so that they don't require massive amounts of hard disk space. There is no need to be concerned that your user may have their CD Rom drive installed on a different drive letter as Illuminatus finds the first CD Rom drive on the system automatically. It also means that you can run slideshows of PhotoCD images, particularly when used in conjunction with the All Files option.

Transparency

Slideshow can now be displayed transparently so they can appear over the background or build up in layers.

Special Effects

You can choose the way the pictures appear in a slideshow by using the Effects option.

Animations

By building a slideshow from the frames of an animation created by a bitmap animation package such as Animation Works Interactive or by creating them manually in a paint program you can create your own animations in Illuminatus. You need to set the timing of the slideshow to 0.1secs for smooth animation. The speed of animation will depend on the size of the graphics you are using and the speed of your users computer.

This can, however, be particularly useful for producing animated buttons, several of which are provided with the program.

Related Topics

Recreating Standard Presentation Effects


Frame Options: Summary

The Summary on the front of the dialog allows you to set some of the properties of the frame and to switch properties set up on the other sections on and off conveniently.

Click on the area of the dialog on which you require further information.


Frame Options: Text

This section allows you to place text into your frame either by typing it into the box provided or by using the file list boxes at the bottom of the dialog to find a disk-based file of the text you want to use and then clicking the Import button to load it into the frame.

Click the Font button to bring up a standard Windows font selection dialog for you to choose a typeface, font size, style and colour from any of those installed on your system.

If you have a lot of text to display in a small area you can click the Scrolling checkbox on and the frame will turn into a scrolling text box. Unlike standard Windows scrolling text boxes these are transparent and so can be displayed over the background colour of your frame or page or even over pictures. Unlike static text, scrolling text does need to use a font when being displayed so if your publication is to be viewed on a different computer you will need to ensure that the other machine has the same font or choose one which is likely to be on most systems e.g: Arial or Times. If the font is not present the text will still display but Illuminatus will ask Windows for the closest font available or use a standard system font which may change the appearance of your text.

Note: The scrollbars for scrolling text boxes only display in Preview mode and do not appear in Page View.

You can highlight particular parts of your text by dragging the cursor over them to select them and then clicking on one of the buttons to the right of the box to apply Bold, Underline, Italic and a particular colour chosen beforehand from a drop down list below the Apply Colour button. You will notice that doing this inserts codes before and after the highlighted section. These can be inserted manually if you want by typing them in just like any other text which means they can be included in text files created in separate word processors and even used in button captions. You can also use these codes in scrolling text boxes. A Remove Format button is provided for you to easily remove all the formatting codes from your text should you change your mind.

Text Formatting

Text can be used along with pictures or background colour and will appear over them.


Frame Title

This option on the Summary of the Frame Options dialog allows you to set a title for your frame so that it is visible elsewhere in the program. The primary use for this is for popup frames and when you check the popup frame checkbox Illuminatus automatically provides a default frame title which you can, of course, subsequently edit to suit.

Show Frame

Hide Frame

PopUp Frames

Titles and Filenames


Frequently Asked Questions

Why did that function not work/crash?

The most frequent cause of problems with Illuminatus is a lack of disk space while Illuminatus is in the middle of something. If you experience problems with Illuminatus check your disk space and other system resources and try again.

This is particularly true when Compiling and Publishing. For this reason we have introduced some messages to warn you if you are getting low on disk space. Please note that this is only a warning and small publications may still fit into the space you have available. You will also be told if the Compile/Publish failed to complete properly but the advance warning, we hope will help stop the frustration of compiling a large publication only to find it has failed because of lack of disk space.

Why are some frames and pages black or blank in my publication when everything looks set up correctly?

This usually indicates that Illuminatus cannot find some of the resources (images, sound, videos etc.) used in the publication. This will often happen if you loading a sample publication from a CD Rom such as the one which comes with Illuminatus or if you are working on a publication on a different machine or on a different network drive.

If it is only the drive which has changed you can use the Change Data Drive to change the drive itself.

You can also use Check Location to establish which resources are missing and why and to reassign the link to the new location.

Why can't I click on the editing handles for a particular frame when the one next to it works fine?

You cannot select objects through other objects. You must bring the object to the front, if necessary by sending the other object to the back. This is also true of the editing handles relating to objects so beware of this when trying to edit objects immediately alongside each other as they do not look as though they overlap but their editing handles may be "underneath" the neighbouring object and will not be selected

Why don't I get a scrollbars when I click on the scrolling checkbox?

The scrollbars on a scrolling text box only appear in Preview mode and in your finished publication. They do not appear in Page View.

Furthermore, scrollbars will only appear if the frame is too small for the text it contains.

Why do filenames keep disappearing from the bottom of my slideshow list?

Slideshows can only contain 50 images. If you have included more Illuminatus will ignore those beyond 50. If you need more images simply create two slideshows and delay one until the end of the other. Slideshows.

Why is my publication so slow in 16 colour VGA mode?

If you run a 256-colour publication on a system in 16-colour VGA mode Illuminatus optimises each page to ensure that the publication looks the best it can (the alternative would be entirely unacceptable quality graphics). This can slow the publication down. The only alternative is to create a dedicated 16 colour version.

Why won't the Report Text dialog let me specify a filename for the text to be stored in when I'm select the Text Input option?

You set the filenames for the text files where text input by the user will be stored on the Frame Options Summary and not on the Report Text dialog. This enables you to specify different files for different input frames but record them on disk with one button.

Why do my buttons no longer work?

Check the details on the Button Options: Summary page for these buttons to see if the title for the object they were pointing at has been lost. This usually happens because the title for the page/frame has been changed since it was connected to the button.

Why can't I use the keyboard to access items from the tabbed dialogs?

Because of technical limitations within Windows the Illuminatus tabbed dialogs do not provide keyboard support, you will need a mouse to use the program. Apologies for any inconvenience caused.

Why did I get a Divide by Zero error when loading my publication?

This almost certainly indicates that your .MPB publication file has been corrupted somehow or if you suddenly run out of disk space (e.g: someone copies something across the network) before Illuminatus has a chance to notice the lack of disk space.

Why do I get a flash of black or white where text input frames, video or scrolling text frames have been?

This is an unavoidable result of the area of the page being updated at a slightly different time to the main page under the control of the Windows operating system. This may be lessened in Windows 95. We are currently investigating the possibility of taking over this function ourselves to avoid the problem.


FrmOptsNote
These checkboxes allow you to turn of the contents

set up on the other tabs conveniently. For further

information on each click on the relevant tab at the

top of the picture.


From CD

This is a special option for slideshows, animation and video files which instructs your publication to retrieve the file required from CD Rom rather than incorporate it into your publication. This is especially useful for files which would otherwise take large amounts of disk space to install and for creating PhotoCD slideshows.

It does not matter if the CD is in a different drive letter to the one you set it up on as Illuminatus will automatically find the first CD Rom drive on the system and look there.

Slideshows

Moving Images


Goto Page

This allows you to set a button to move the publication to another page. Select the page required from the drop down list of Page Titles provided. It is as well to have set up all the page titles before you start assigning buttons to move to them as the button will not find the page if you change the name subsequently.

In addition to the titles of specific pages there are three special variable pages you can choose...<Forward>, <Backward> and <Previous>. The first two take your publication on one page or back one page as appropriate in the order in which the pages appear in publication view. The third option takes the publication back to the last page your user was one irrespective of where that it.


Graphical Buttons

You can now have graphical buttons in Illuminatus. There are three button states: up, down and when the mouse is over the button but hasn't clicked on it, called highlighted. You can set a graphic for any or all of these via the Button Options: Graphic dialog.

You can set graphical buttons to be transparent so that the background is ignored and this enables you to have irregularly-shaped buttons of any shape you like.

A great many graphics for buttons are provided with the program, usually these will include a "d" or "dn" for down graphics and "h" for highlight graphics.


Graphics

Graphics are very important in Illuminatus. They can be used as backgrounds or illustrations in both frames and page backgrounds or they can impose a design on an Illuminatus page as several of the backgrounds supplied with the program do.

To import a graphic simply click on the frame or page background you want the graphic to be in and then locate the file you want by using the file list boxes at the bottom of the Background dialog.

Checking the Scale to Fit option will resize the picture to fill the background, with the Keep Aspect option checked the picture will not be stretched out of proportion in order to make it fit. The scale to fit option is not relevant for vector format pictures such as .WMF or .CGM.

ClipArt

Illuminatus supports all the major graphics formats and so enables you to utilise your existing graphics and draw on the wide range of clipart available from ourselves and from third parties

Formats Supported

Illuminatus will import the following graphics formats: .BMP. .PCX. .TIF, .GIF, .TGA, .WPG, JPEG, .WMF and .CGM

Palettes

If you are displaying 256 colour graphics in super VGA 256 colour mode it stands to reason that displaying more than one graphic may need more than the 256 colour slots available. This can cause problems if you want to display two or more 256 colour graphics on the same page as the palettes of the two graphics may be different and interfere with each other. This is called palette clash but Illuminatus now includes a special OmniPalette function to avoid the problem.

Important Note: If you are displaying a graphics format in a lower graphics mode e.g: a 16million colour graphic in 256 colour mode or a 256 colour graphic in 16colour mode Illuminatus does not attempt to simulate the correct colours for the image when displaying it in the editor. The image may therefore appear very poor until you publish or compile you publication.

Sound

Moving Images

Text


Help Menu Option

Contents

Takes you to the Contents page of this help file.

Read this First

Opens up the Read this First section of this help file.

Reference Guide

Takes you to the a comprehensive guide to the functions of Illuminatus

Commands

Takes you to the list of all the commands in the program.

Keyboard Shortcuts

Takes you straight to a list of the keys you can press to access certain Illuminatus functions without using the menus or toolbar.

Using help

Provides help on using help if required.

Technical Support

Sections providing technical support and problem solving.

About

Shows a page showing details of Illuminatus including the version and the licence details.


Hide Frame

This option on the Summary page of the Button Options dialog enables you to instruct a button to hide a popup frame which has been displayed earlier by a Show Frame command.

The fame must have been set as a popup frame by checking the popup frame checkbox on the Frame Options: Summary dialog.

Click the Hide Frame checkbox and then select the frame you want by clicking on its title in the drop down list of those available the right of the checkbox.


Hints and Tips

Cutting and Pasting Text

You can cut and paste text between the Illuminatus Text box and any other Windows application using Ctrl+C for Copy and Ctrl+V (or Shift+Insert) for Paste.

Using Export Page

One use for the Export Page option is to quickly turn text into graphics. Export the page and then cut out the pieces of text and save them as graphics. You can then use these graphics of your text to create text slideshows and other standard presentation effects. You can temporarily give the relevant frame a border for reference when you come to cut the item out.

Another simple use for this is to flip or invert a piece of the background texture or to draw a white line around the top left and black around the bottom and right to create and embossed or inset look to a frame.

Publish A Sample Page

When you have decided on the colour scheme, background and the general type of content for your publication you may wish to publish a sample page to the colour mode you have chosen just to check that the colours will reproduce in that graphics mode properly before you spend time completing the publication.

Big Publications

Publications with a large number of pages can be slow to work with so you may like to consider breaking the publication down into sections and creating each of these separately. You can either daisy-chain them or if you need your final publication to be a single file you can cut and paste the modules together at the last minute.

Titles

Illuminatus uses title extensively to label items in the publication. In particular you will need them for slideshows, animation, video and frames or these elements will not be visible throughout the rest of the program. (See Titles and Filenames  for further details).

Speed of Operation

You can speed up the program during editing by switching off the thumbnails used to preview pages in the Publication View and by not previewing bitmaps in Page View. Both of these options are available from the Preferences item on the File menu.

For obvious reasons display of multimedia pages from within the Illuminatus editor using the Preview option will be considerably slower than the final Compiled or Published version.

Creating Illuminatus Pages in Your Favourite Application

If you want to create your pages or parts of your pages in other applications you can do so. You can even go so far as to design the whole page in another application and then either export it as an appropriate size bitmap, or as a vector (.WMF or .CGM) graphic or simply grab a screenshot using Alt-PrintScreen.

The result can be imported into an appropriate Illuminatus frame and the buttons connected as required.

Getting Bitmaps the Right Size

Bitmap graphics will invariably work best if they are the same size as the frame they are going into. This especially important for sixteen colour graphics. If sixteen colour graphics are dithered reducing them to fit in an Illuminatus frame can give them an unwanted tartan effect.

In the status bar at the bottom of the screen Illuminatus tells you the size and position of the button or frame you have selected.

If you are creating your bitmaps specially you may find it helps to save the Illuminatus page or the page template you are using them in as a bitmap using Export Page (see Export Page) from the File menu in Page View. You can then load this into your paint program and use it for reference in creating your bitmap.

Rolling Demos

For rolling demos variation in the graphics is most eye-catching. Changes in the predominant colour of the screen and strong main graphics can be most effective in exhibition situations where attention-getting is the key. This can, however, make the presentation uncomfortable to read so for shop windows it is less useful. In both cases a consistent basic design should be maintained to let viewers quickly read the information you are presenting once you have caught their attention.

Background Music and Sound Effects

You can play a WAV file over the top of a MID file without stopping the latter. So you can, for example, use a MID file for the background music and then use a WAV spot effect or fanfare over it as required. Don't forget that AVI files can have WAV sound tracks in them and so can interrupt any other WAV files you have running.

SoundBlaster Pro

If you have a SoundBlaster Pro card we recommend you get the Super SAPI driver for it as this greatly improves the quality of output under Windows.

All the midi music supplied with Illuminatus is intended for optimised for such a setup.

Frame Borders

The Frame Options dialog allows you to switch the border for a frame on or off (by choosing None) or to add one of several different styles. To add more sophisticated borders you can use frames within frames. Use the outer frame to hold a graphic border for the text, graphic, animation or video in the inner frame.

Video and Animation Preview Bitmaps

Frames in which video or animations will run can leave large empty gaps but you can grab a frame from the video to use as a preview as follows:

Run the Media Player accessory which comes with windows and open the appropriate video or animation file. Using the slideshow buttons on Media Player step through the individual frames of the file until you find one you want to use to represent the file. Copy it to the Clipboard by pressing Alt-PrintScreen. Open Paintshop Pro and Paste the clipboard file into there. You can then edit and save the video frame as a bitmap graphic which can be displayed in the same Illuminatus frame that the video or animation itself will appear in.

Colour Schemes

Colour can be the make or break of any presentation and multimedia publishing is no different. For those untrained in design we recommend that the basic design is limited to a neutral colour (grey, black or white) with one other colour. Using grey as the main colour gives you dark and light grey, plus black for shadows and white for highlights. This will also give the multimedia publication a Windows feel and Windows users will feel comfortable with it. This also means that you can easily find examples of colour schemes which work and ones which don't by your own response to the colour schemes employed by Windows programs.

Sixteen vs 256 colours

Using 256 colours in your publication is always preferable and for scanned pictures, digitised video or sophisticated colours it is essential. In 256 colours your graphics will be much closer to photographic quality than in sixteen colours.

It doesn't matter whether your user has a system capable of displaying 256 colour graphics as Illuminatus has a special automagic feature which recognises what mode it is running in and adapts 256 colour graphics to 16 if required.

The real problem with 256 colour graphics is that they can be very large.

If you wish to create a sixteen colour publication best effects in sixteen colours are achieved by avoiding dithered colours wherever possible. Stylish effects can still be achieved using mono or sixteen colour graphics, particularly by using bold icon or symbol type images. (Several examples are supplied in the samples which accompany this program.)

If your publication is to be displayed in 16 colours but contains graphics intended for display at 256 colours (or higher), particularly greyscale or colour scans or photographic images, then you should compile it to sixteen colours so that you can examine the consequences. If you want greater control over how the sixteen colour graphics are created you should reduce them yourself. We recommend PaintShop Pro for this as some of the dithering options it offers can be quite attractive in themselves.

NOTE: Both Animator animations and video files will display on standard 16 colour VGA systems but the effects may be unpredictable. AVI video general works quite well but the colours in Animator files may not convert properly. Animations produced by Windows bitmap animation programs like Animation Works Interactive, CorelMove etc. can create sixteen-colour animations which avoid these problems but are not suitable where large areas are being animated.

Reducing File Size

If you need to reduce the size of your final publication consider some of the following options. Reducing the number of colours in a graphic can also drastically effect the size of the file involved.

Pictures with lots of  detail and variation in colour or tone will compress poorly so try to replace them with graphics with flatter areas of colour.

If you have reduced the number of colours in a graphic using a dithering option try and alternative dither as some nice-looking dithers can produce files which do not compress very well at all.

As a last resort consider whether any graphics can actually be removed.

Consider replacing WAV files with midi files or removing them completely as these can be very big and do not compress very well.

Consistent Style

If you a creating a series of documents on the same theme or for the same purpose it is advisable to choose a "house style" for your documents. Base the bulk of your publication on one or two page template designs - the templates supplied with Illuminatus often have several variations on designs for just this purpose. Use this page consistently with the same colour scheme, the same fonts and the same position for your company logo or the motto/title for the presentation.

Getting Ideas

Keep your eyes open for other multimedia programs, demonstrations and presentations which work particularly well and try to decide what makes them successful.

Television is a similar medium to multimedia publishing so TV programs, particularly current affairs and news programs, can often provide inspiration for page designs or simply illustrate effective techniques. You will also see reviews of many multimedia products in specialist magazines which can often prompt your own creativity.

Creating Your Publication Efficiently


HotKey

This option allows you to assign a keystroke to a particular button and thereby allows the user to press a key to perform an action rather than click on the button with the mouse.

Simply type the character you want to use in the box provided. This function does not differentiate between uppercase and lowercase so "A" or "a" in the hotkey box will let the button be activated by the user pressing "a" or "A".

You can also use a space in the hotkey box although this is not actually visible it will work.


Hotspots

By checking the Invisible option on the Summary of Button Options dialog buttons can be used as hotspots as they are not visible but can still perform the action assigned to them.

They can be placed on a graphic so that when the user clicks on the graphic he/she is clicking on the invisible button.

By highlighting specific words in your text and using an invisible button beneath it you can simulate hypertext.

You can use a custom cursor to highlight hidden buttons if required.

Button Options: Summary


Important Considerations

Speed

Illuminatus will run on any PC which will run Windows 3.1 but the program will be more enjoyable to work with on a 66Mhz 486 or better. If you are running it on a slower machine you can speed up the program by switching off the thumbnails used to preview pages in the Publication View and by not previewing bitmaps in Page View. Both of these options are available from the Preferences item on the File menu.

For obvious reasons display of multimedia pages from within the Illuminatus Editor using the Preview option will be considerably slower than the final compiled or published version. This is particularly true when using large graphics in compressed formats such as JPG.

Volume Levels

WAV and MID files are produced differently on any soundcard and the difference in the volume levels can be quite considerable. Your sound card may come with a mixer utility which allows you to set up the relative volumes of playback. With SoundBlaster this is the SBMixer utility. Adjust the controls until WAV and MID files are played back at equal volumes. You may also wish to use the Wave Editor provided with the program to change the volume of the WAV files to match midi if you are using both in the distributable publication.

Page Zoom

Please note that some details of the page may not be properly visible if the page view is reduced too much. This is particularly true of any colours which are dithered. Single lines of pixels including frame boxes may temporarily disappear.

Distributing Other Programs

When you want a button to launch a program for you Illuminatus will need the complete location for the program (e.g: c:\windows\calculator.exe). If the program is distributed with the publication this is not necessary as Illuminatus will put it into the same directory as the publication so that it knows where to find it.

There is an option which allows you to include the program with the distributable version of the publication so that it is installed on your reader's computer. This is the only way to ensure that the reader has the program and that it is currently installed. But obviously you can only distribute these programs if their copyright-holder allows it or if you have a licence to do so.

You will also need to ensure that Illuminatus also distributes any supplementary files the program needs (e.g: special drivers, sound files or .DLL's). A dialog asking for details of supplementary files will prompt you when you set up a button to launch a program.

Other files

All the elements you include in the publication (graphics, text, sound, animation, video clips) are built into the distribution file when Illuminatus creates you publication so there is no need to distribute the original files.

Text

Remember that even users familiar with computers are not as used to reading screens as they are paper. If you need a lot of text for any reason try to break into down into manageable chunks. This is particularly important in rolling presentations where text should be a large bold style so that it can be read at a glance and get its message across quickly or entice the viewer in to read the smaller text. Avoid large amounts of text unless the publication is an online book. If you have a lot of text to display split it over several pages and make it exciting to look at.


Insert Blank Page

 select Insert Blank Page from the Publication menu in Publication View

This option allows you to add an entirely blank page to your publication on which you can draw a template of buttons and frames of your own design.

Once you have selected this option the cursor will change to show you have a page to paste and you can then click in your publication window at the point where you want the page inserted.

Related Topics

Editing Page Elements

Selecting and Moving Pages

Insert Page Template

Insert Page

Insert Master Page

Save As Master Page

About Master Pages


Insert Master Page

 select Insert Master Page from the Publication menu in Publication View

Allows you to insert a page which has been previously saved to disk as a master page. All its properties and contents will be included. To build your publication quickly you can check the Multiple Copies option and type the number you require in the box provided.

Related Topics

Selecting and Moving Pages

Insert Page Template

Insert Blank Page

Insert Page

Save As Master Page

About Master Pages


Insert Page

 select Insert Page from the Publication menu in Publication View

Allows you to insert a page which has been previously saved to disk. All its properties and contents will be included. To build your publication quickly you can check the Multiple Copies option and type the number you require in the box provided.

Related Topics

Selecting and Moving Pages

Insert Page Template

Insert Blank Page

Insert Master Page

Save As Master Page

About Master Pages


Insert Page Template

 select Insert Page Template from the Publication menu in Publication View

Allows you to insert a ready-made page template from the wide selection provided with the product or those you have saved to disk using the Save Page As Template option. These already contain frames and buttons and are designed in a variety of styles for a variety of roles.

You can limit the list of templates to a specific style by selecting that style from the List Files of Type box at the bottom of the dialog.

Related Topics

Selecting and Moving Pages

Insert Blank Page

Insert Page

Insert Master Page

Save As Master Page

About Master Pages


Installation Setup

 select Installation Setup from the Publication menu in Publication View

This option allows you to set your preferences for the way the distributable version of your multimedia publication will be installed. This includes things like where the publication will be installed

Click on the aspect you want further details on.

You can select a title (you must have a title for the publication before it can be published). This title is used as your publications name under Windows - it is used under the icon and in the title bar of the publication's window. The title is not the same as the filename for the program element of your publication.

You can setup the directory which will be used as the default when your reader installs your publication. (They can change it to suit if required.)

You can also choose an icon which will represent the publication in your reader's Program Manager. Use the Browse button to locate and open the file you want.

You can also set the size of disk you will be publishing your publication on. Click on one of the three options provided to select either 3.5" HD, 3.5DD or 5.25HD disks. This information is only used when you Publish your publication. The Compile function does not divide you publication into disk-sized chunks. If you wish to produce material for CD Rom you can ignore this setting because you will want to Compile rather than Publish.

This dialog can be called up from the publishing dialog when you come to it but the title must be established in advance. Illuminatus will prompt you for a title if you haven't set one.

Related Topics

Preferences

Publication Options


Installation Setup: Background

 select Installation Setup from the Publication menu in Publication View

This option allows you specify a colour scheme or graphic which will appear in the background of your setup program. Usually this is the familiar graduated blue-black background.

Illuminatus provides several colour schemes which you can select from the Fill Style drop down list. You can also create your own by clicking on the respective Palette buttons to choose a colour for the graduation to go From and another to go To.

You can also insert bitmap graphics by clicking on the Image checkbox. Use the Browse button to locate the graphic you want to use. It could be a full screen promotional or welcome graphic or it could be a small reminder about something. If the image is smaller than the screen it will be centred over the background graduation chosen.

The preview box will show you what the background looks like at any time.

The program will automatically display the title of your publication in the topleft hand corner of the setup screen. You can disable this by editing the .ini for your publication in a text editor. Change the Show Text=Yes to Show Text=No to switch this off.


Installation Setup: Cover Dialog

 select Installation Setup from the Publication menu in Publication View

This is one of the special features of Illuminatus. It allows you to set the dialog which will be displayed while the program loads. This could be a simple copyright notice or it can be a full blown cover page for your publication. You could even export a copy of the first page of your publication using Export Page and use that.

You do not have to set a cover dialog in which case the default one will be used.


Installation Setup: Programs

This option allows you to specify any additional programs you want to distribute with your publication. This does not need to include programs which you are launching directly if you have checked the Distribute Files option but  may include .DLLs and text files required by those programs. It can also include other multimedia publications you want to launch and or completely separate utility or support programs.

You can choose to set up any of these programs to install an icon with your publication to allow your user access to them or they can simply be distributed to be available to your publication.

Click the Add button to add a new entry to the list this puts the default title <new> into this list and then select it to edit is properties. You can then use the Browse button to locate the file you want to use which then appears alongside the Program: label. You edit the title for the program to suit by simply typing it into the Title box which automatically replace the <new>. Titles and Filenames

If the program needs command line arguments or parameters, say if you want it to start up with a particular file then you can type these details into the Arguments box.

If you want to install an icon for this program click on the Install Icon checkbox and use the Browse button to locate the icon you want.

You can remove a program you do not want to distribute by selecting its title in the list and clicking on the Delete button.


Installation Setup: Publication

 select Installation Setup from the Publication menu in Publication View

Title for Publication

You can select a title (you must have a title for the publication before it can be published). This title is used as your publications name under Windows - it is used under the icon and in the title bar of the publication's window. The title is not the same as the filename for your publication. It can be up to 25 characters long and can contain spaces.

Default Directory

When a standard Setup program runs to install a program under Windows it usually has a directory where it will be installed unless the user changes it. This option allows you to set that directory. It will be displayed by the setup program and your user can accept or change it as necessary. Usually you will want to put the directory in c:\ and give it a name related to its subject matter e.g: c:\catalog.

Note: We recommend you always install your publications into their own directories and in particular do not install your publication to the Windows directory.

Icon

You can also choose an icon which will represent the publication in your user's Program Manager. Use the Browse button to locate and open the file you want.

Disk Size

You can also set the size of disk you will be publishing your publication on. This enables Illuminatus to calculate what size chunks to divide your publication into when it is being published.

Click on one of the four options provided to select either 3.5" HD, 3.5"DD or 5.25"HD disks or CD Rom. This information is only used when you Publish your publication. The Compile function does not divide you publication into disk-sized chunks. Obviously the CD Rom option publishes everything into a single directory and doesn't break it up into chunks.

This dialog can be called up from the publishing dialog when you come to it but the title must be established in advance. Illuminatus will prompt you for a title if you haven't set one.

Related Topics

Preferences

Publication Options


Invisible

Allows you to make a button invisible but still functional so that it can be hidden under other buttons or graphics or text to act like a hotspot. If the button has a caption this will still appear in the editor but not in the finished publication which can be useful for reminding you of the button's function while editing.

Hotspots


Keyboard Shortcuts

The following keyboard shortcuts are available in Illuminatus.

New Publication	Ctrl+N

Open Publication	Ctrl+0

Save Publication	Ctrl+S

Print  	Ctrl+P

Exit 	Alt+X

Summary Info	Ctrl+I

Cut	Ctrl+X

Copy 	Ctrl+C

Paste	Ctrl+V

Paste In Original Position	Alt+Ctrl+V

Delete	Delete

Select All	Ctrl+A

Edit Selected Object	Enter

FirstPage	Home

LastPage	End

NextPage 	Page Up

PreviousPage	Page Down

Preview 	F5

Compile 	F8

Publish 	F9

Switching between

Page View

and

Publication View	Enter


Last Page

 select Next Page from the Page menu.	End

Takes you to the last page in the current publication.

You can use the End key as an shortcut/alternative.

You can also move to any page in your publication by selecting its title from the drop down list box in the toolbar in Page View.

Related Topics

Zoom 50%

Zoom 100%

Zoom To Fit

Next Page

Previous Page

First Page

Preview


Launch

This enables you to launch another program set up via the Launch tab. This checkbox on the Summary page lets you switch the set up Launch function on and off easily.

Button Options: Launch.

See also

Launching Other Programs


Launching Other Programs

Illuminatus allows you to program buttons to launch other programs. See Button Options: Launch for instructions.

An example of this would be to launch the Powerpoint Viewer program (PPTVIEW.EXE) and with the presentation you wanted it to view given in the With Parameter box.

This is the function which enables you to extend Illuminatus with ILX extensions. You launch your chosen extension which performs the additional function for you and then either simply drops back into your publication or relaunches your publication giving it a page number to jump to, as a parameter if required. Further Details Extension Programs

This also means it can be used as a front end for a compilation of programs or even a front end for a series of Illuminatus publications.

If the program you launch requires additional programs (text files, graphics or .DLLs) you need to distribute these files with your publication by adding them to the Programs section of the Installation Setup (Installation Setup: Programs)

Paths

In order for the Launch function to work it must have the right path to the program it will launch and this may well be different on your machine to your user's machine. Further guidance see Pathnames.

Copyright

Don't forget that to include these programs in your multimedia publication you must have a licence to do so or the program and associated files must be public domain.


Learning About Illuminatus

Of course the best way to learn about Illuminatus is to read the manual from cover to cover and then run the disk-based tutorial but most of you won't have the discipline for that so...

If you are an experienced computer-user the first step in learning to use Illuminatus is to read the Quick Start here or in the manual. Then explore the program and the samples before going back to the manual for further details and fine tuning your understanding as required.

If you are less experienced you should also read the Getting Started section of the manual.

About the Manual

The User Guide provides a stepped introduction to Illuminatus with Getting Started providing the basics, Getting Further provides additional material of use to most users once they are familiar with the program and then Getting Serious offers details of more advanced functionality.

About the Help

This online help provides all the additional information you may need providing a comprehensive reference for all the functions of the program as well as hints and tips, technical information and late-breaking news. It also provides context-sensitive help from the various dialogs in the program.


Left

 select Align from the Edit menu in Page View

Selecting this option will align the lefthand edge of all selected items with the lefthand edge of the object furthest to the left.

Right

Top

Bottom

Centre Vertically

Centre Horizontally


Licences & Upgrades

Multimedia Clipart Licence

The graphics and sound files which come with this program are copyright Digital Workshop and Words & Pictures. They can be used freely in commercial or non-commercial publications produced with Illuminatus but MAY NOT be distributed separately from the Illuminatus program or a multimedia publication created with it.

Additional User Licences

Additional licences for Illuminatus are available at discounts according to the number required. Special rates are available for educational licences.

Free Upgrades

Digital Workshop is committed to fair play on upgrades. Wherever possible  will have upgrades to fix bugs and upgrades to add features, not both. So you will only have to pay for new features. Upgrades to fix bugs will be free although a small handling and postage charge may be necessary for customers who do not have access to Compuserve or CIX where maintenance releases will be made available. Please note however that maintenance releases will only be available to registered users.


Loading Samples from CD Rom

If you are opening an Illuminatus .mpb file into the Illumintaus Editor from a CD the chances are that the publication was actually created on a different drive and so Illuminatus will look on that drive for the graphics, sound files, backgrounds etc. (Most people create their Illuminatus publications in a subdirectory of their C: drive and most people will have their CDRom as drive D: or E:)

A special function in Illuminatus lets you know when this is happening and offers to help.

To tell Illuminatus to look for the resources on a different drive you can use the Change Data Drive option from Data Files on the File menu. Simply type the drive letter where the resources can be found into the box provided as in the example below.

If you continue to find that there are black pages and blank areas in your example use the Check Location function, again from Data Files on the File menu to check the connection with each individual file.

Data Files


Location

This panel appears on the Summary page of both frame and button options. and allows you to edit the exact size and location of the object by editing the figures in the Top, Left, Width and Height boxes.

You can also alter the position of your object precisely by using the Nudge function.


Move

 select Move from the Edit menu in Page View

This option allows you to dictate the order in which frames and buttons will appear on the screen. Please note, however, that for technical reasons all frames are drawn first and all buttons drawn over the top. So ordering of frames is within the frame "layer" and ordering of buttons is confined within the button "layer".

To Front

To Back


Moving Images

Animations

Illuminatus supports the industry-standard .FLC and .FLI formats of animation. These are the native formats of the Autodesk range of animation products - Animator, Animator Pro and 3D Studio but they are supported by a wide range of other programs and utilities.

There are large numbers of such animations available on bulletin boards or from third parties and many companies can produce them to order.

Video

Illuminatus supports the Microsoft Video for Windows AVI format. There are an increasing number of video clips in this format available in collections from third parties. You can only play

Slideshows

You can also create simple animations using the inbuilt slideshow function and several are provided free with the program. Slideshows

MPEG

This is a standard format for compressing, storing and replaying video and film material which achieves superb quality and compression but requires an MPEG video expansion card to be present to view the files.

Graphics

Sound

Text


Multiple Actions

There will be times when you want more than one action to take place from one button. Button options provide several actions which can be assigned on the same button, quite simply you can select any of the items with a square checkbox (secondary actions) and one of the items with round radio buttons (primary actions).

To add multiple primary actions you can pile buttons on top of each other. When the user clicks on one they are all activated. This also allows you to create timers for events by using the Delay option to turn off the event started by the original button.

Because you can't select objects through each other you should make your lower frame/button larger than the one above it so that it can be easily selected. When you have finished your publication set the buttons to exactly the same size and shape if required.


Multiple Publications

Illuminatus allows you to have more than one publication open at one time. It will open a separate window for each publication and you can move, resize and minimize these publication windows just like the main window though they always remain within their "parent" window.

You can also use the Window option on the menu bar to close and reorganise your windows. Selecting Tile from this menu is very useful when you want to view two publications or pages together.

The number of publications you can have open at any one time will depend on the amount of memory, system resources and hard disk space you have available.

Having multiple publications open enables you to cut and paste pages between publications. This saves you recreating a page you have used in one publication and now want to use in another. Simply open both publications and select Tile from the Windows menu option. Click on the page you want to copy and click on the Copy button on the toolbar or select Copy from the Edit menu. Then click on the window of the publication you want to paste the page into and select Paste from the edit menu or click the Paste button on the toolbar. You cursor will change to show you are holding pages and you can paste them into your publication by clicking at whatever point you want them to go.


New Features

There are a great many changes and improvements in this version of Illuminatus. The following details some of the most significant ones.

OmniPalette option to avoid palette clash

Illuminatus now includes an OmniPalette option which banishes palette clash between the graphics in your publications simply by checking a checkbox when you compile or publish.

Built In Scrolling Text

Any frame can now be a scrolling text box and what's more it will be transparent so the background colour, picture or texture underneath it can show through. Text

Graphical Buttons

Buttons can now be assigned a graphic for up down and highlighted states. These graphics can be used transparently to create buttons any size or shape you want. Graphical Buttons

Transparency

Bitmaps can now be displayed transparently, allowing you irregular objects on screen without their backgrounds.

Graphical buttons can also have transparent areas and so be any shape you like.

Slideshows too can be transparent and so can now be played over backgrounds (great for moving mouse cursors and arrows around) and layered (ideal for building up animated maps and plan diagrams).

Improved Page Editing and Controls

Page editing functions have been extended to include Cut and Paste of buttons and frames and multiple Undo and Redo. There's also a nudge feature to move objects around a pixel at a time, you can centre objects and can move and resize multiple objects at once.  And button options now include Forward, Backward and Previous Page controls.

Slideshows, Videos and Animations can be replayed from CD Rom

Illuminatus will find the CD Rom so it doesn’t matter if it’s not D: drive. Great for producing slideshows of PhotoCD images. You can choose to slideshow all the files in a directory with a single option.

Publish to 16.7million colours, 800x600 and 1024x768

We’ve extended the program’s scope to cover 16.7million colours and to allow 800x600 and 1024x768 publications.

Customisable Setup Program with StartUp Graphic and even Faster Loading

Because of our modular feature design Illuminatus publications have always been quicker to load than many other publishing tools and now they’re even quicker. You can set a cover page which will appear in seconds. Plus the user has control over the buffering and compression of pages, installation of icons for supplementary programs, graphics for start up and setup program.

Custom Cursors

Specify special cursors to show when you’re over a button.

MPEG, PNG and PhotoCD support

Replay MPEG files fully-scalable in frames, incorporate Kodak PhotoCD images. Plus Illuminatus is one of the first commercial packages released to support the new PNG graphics format.

New Fades, Wipes and Effects with variable timing

A wide range of exciting and useful new effects including scrolling, zooms and fades for pages and slideshows all with variable speed.

Full CD Rom of Multimedia Resources and Publications

Illuminatus provides everything you need to make Multimedia publishing easy -even a CD Rom of resources, not just a collection of clipart but specially-designed multimedia dingbats, backgrounds, graphical buttons, copyright free music and sound effects and useful animations. Plus over 100 professionally-designed blank publications ready for you to use so you don't have to be a professional graphic designer to produce professional-looking multimedia.

Take some time to review these resources using the copy of Media Centre included with the program you'll be amazed at what's available.

Improvements

Faster Save and Compressed Save

Illuminatus now provides two ways of saving your publication  an ordinary Save and a compressed Save. They are completely compatible and interchangeable, the only difference is that the compressed save takes longer but, obviously, saves disk space. We would suggest you use the standard Save function to periodically save your publication during editing and then use the Save Compressed when you have finished.

Faster Editing

The Illuminatus Editor has been speeded up considerably.

Optimised Distributable Files

Although there are many more features in this version of the program we have optimised the files required for distribution to keep them to the minimum your particular publication requires so, for example, if you don't use Search, PhotoCD or animations the facilities for these functions are not distributed with your publication.

Special Effects

Special effects have been improved so they should perform at similar speeds on different computers.


New Publication

 select New Publication from the File menu.  Ctrl+N

Creates a new, untitled publication without pages or page templates. You will be asked what size you would like the publication to be and can choose from 640x480, 800x600, 1024x768 by clicking on the appropriate radio button.


New Publication from Template

 select New Publication from Template from the File menu.

Opens a new publication from a skeleton version of a publication (Publication Template) which already contains the page templates necessary for the chosen publication.


Next Page

 select Next Page from the Page menu.	PageDown

Takes you to the next page in the current publication.

You can use the Page Down as an shortcut/alternative.

You can also move to any page in your publication by selecting its title from the drop down list box in the toolbar in Page View.

Related Topics

Zoom 50%

Zoom 100%

Zoom To Fit

Previous Page

First Page

Last Page

Preview


None

This option clears the other mutually-exclusive options and thereby allows you to use a button to play a sound, pop up a frame and/or stop an animation without performing anything else.

Button Options: Summary


Nudge

You can now move your selected object(s) very precisely by "nudging" them one pixel at a time in any direction using the appropriate arrow keys. Thus...

...the Up Arrow key will move the selected objects up by one pixel.

...the Down Arrow key will move the selected objects down by one pixel.

...the Left Arrow key will move the selected objects left by one pixel.

...the Right Arrow key will move the selected objects right by one pixel.

This is an excellent way of lining objects up precisely or fine tuning their position.

You can nudge single objects or multiple objects.


OmniPalette

This option is provided on the Compile and Publish dialogs and tells Illuminatus to use an optimised palette for all your graphics and therefore avoid palette clash.

OmniPalette is specially designed to produce acceptable results on the widest range of illustrations but if your illustrations are all very similar and contain mostly similar colours the OmniPalette option may be too much of a compromise. In this instance you can optimise the palette manually.


Open Master Page

This is a special file dialog which allows you to select a Master Page to be loaded into your publication. Select the page by typing its name in the File Name: box or double-click on it in the list box below. The page must have previously been saved to disk using the Save As Master Page option.

The page will contain all the frames and buttons which it was saved with, together with the graphics and other resources assuming the original files have not been deleted in the meantime. It is essentially identical to an ordinary page except that it is saved into a separate directory for ease of use and organisation.

The page you have chosen will be previewed in the box provided and you can load multiple copies of the same page by clicking on the multiple copies option and typing the number required into the box alongside.

This option is useful for reusing pages repeatedly in different publications and may be useful for specialist pages like order forms or message boxes.

About Master Pages


Open Page

This is a standard Open File dialog which allows you to select a specific page to be loaded into your publication. Select the page by using the drive and directory list boxes to find the file you want and then type its name in the File Name: box or double-click on it in the list box below. The page must have previously been saved to disk using the Save Page As option. Saved pages have the extension .pge.

The page will contain all the frames and buttons which it was saved with, together with the graphics and other resources assuming the original files have not been deleted in the meantime.

You can also open Master Pages using this option. These are simply pages stored in a special directory.

The page you have chosen will be previewed in the box provided and you can load multiple copies of the same page by clicking on the multiple copies option and typing the number required into the box alongside.

This option is useful for reusing pages repeatedly in different publications and may be useful for specialist pages like order forms or message boxes.


Open Page Template

This is a standard Open File dialog which allows you to select a skeleton page or page template by using the drive and directory list boxes to find the file you want and then type its Title in the Title box or double-click on it in the list box below. The template you have selected is previewed in the box to the right.

Page Templates are pages of frames and button without any contents. They are arranged in various styles which you can select using the List files of type box at the bottom of the dialog. See About Templates.

A multiple copies option is provided for you to Open more than one page template a at a time. Simply type the number required into the box provided and when you click on the Publication Window to paste the pages in Illuminatus will insert as many copies of the page template as you have requested.

Page templates have the extension .pgt.

If you want to open some of the sample ready-made publications provided with Illuminatus you should use the ordinary Open command from the file menu.


Open Publication

 select Open from the File menu.  Ctrl+O

Opens a publication previously saved to disk. A standard Windows Open dialog allows you to browse your system for the file required. Use the drive and directory list boxes to find the location for the file and then type the name in the Filename box or click on the filename in the list box below.


Open Publication Template

This is a standard Open File dialog which allows you to select a publication template by using the drive and directory list boxes to find the file you want and then type its name in the File Name: box or double-click on it in the list box below.

Publication Templates are collection of Page Templates. See About Templates.

Publication Templates have the file extension .mpt.

If you want to open some of the sample ready-made publications provided with Illuminatus you should use the ordinary Open command from the file menu.


Ordering Information

Select Print Topic from the File menu to Print this Order Form.

ILLUMINATUS - Order Form

Also available directly in the following countires USA, Australia, France, Germany.Scandinavia

Yes. Please rush me the full version with free CD-Rom, manual and lifetime support.

Name:................................................................................................................

Organisation:.....................................................................................................

Address:............................................................................................................

...........................................................................................................................

...........................................................................................................................

Country....................................................PostCode:.........................................

Telephone................................................Fax....................................................

Illuminatus v3.00

........ copies at the special price of 	£129.95  = ...........................

Illuminatus SuperPack

........ copies at the special price of	£179.95  = ...........................

plus postage and handling	£5.00  =............................

Vat @ 17.5% (UK residents only)	=............................

Total	=............................

__ Please charge my credit card: Access/Visa/Mastercard/American Express

Card No:.......................................................................... Expiry Date.................

Signed..................................................................................................................

__I enclose a cheque/postal order/Eurocheque.

Sales Hotline: 	01295 258335 (or outside UK: +44 1295 258335)

Sales Fax: 	01295 254590 (or outside UK: +44 1295 254590)

Email: sales@digitalworkshop.co.uk

Compuserve: [74431,1160]

Cix: theworkshop

Postal Address:

Digital Workshop

19 Parsons Street,

Banbury,

Oxon,

OX16 8LY UK


Ordering Information (Scandinavia)

PRO SOFT  Receives orders from Denmark, Norway, Sweden and Finland

Name:          _________________________________________________________

Evt. company:  _________________________________________________________

Address:  ______________________________________________________________

Address:  ______________________________________________________________

Zipcode:  ______________________________________________________________

City:     ______________________________________________________________

Phone:    ___________________ Fax: _______________

*)   Customers in Sweden and Finland with a local VAT Number (SE),

      will not have to apply VAT (MOMS) 25%, but please add your VAT-number then in line 13 below.

**)  Norwegian customers will have to pay local MOMS (23 %) at the import

      plus a handling-fee to norwegian customs-authorities.

WHAT WE SEND TO YOU:

The registered packages consist of I. Full version on 3.5" 1.44 MB disks,

II. Full description of the program in a professional manual, III. Software-box

IV. CD-Rom with resources (clipart, music, animations, video, buttons,

backgrounds, samples etc & V. Registration-card.

Country:                             Denmark   Sweden&Finland     Norway

Item / Valuta:                        DKR.              DKR.                DKR.

[ ] 1.    Illuminatus 3                1350,00         1350,00        1350,00

[ ] 2.    + Paint Shop Pro         1750,00         1750,00        1750,00

[ ] 3.    Shipping & Handling        28,00            80,00            80,00

[ ] 4.    If not prepaid, COD          18,00           20,00             20,00

[ ] 5.    Check exchange (50,00) ______         ______          ______

6. Total before VAT (MOMS)      ______         ______          ______

7. MOMS (25%) of the above     ______         ______       See above **

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Page

This menu provides control over how your page is displayed.

Zoom 50%

Zoom 100%

Zoom To Fit

Next Page

Previous Page

First Page

Last Page

Preview


Page Options

Double click anywhere empty portion on the background of a page or on the pasteboard outside it to bring up the set of Page Options dialog.

Click on the tab for further details on that aspect


Page Options: Background

You can add a background colour to your page. Clicking on the Palette button brings up a standard Windows colour-selection dialog from which you can choose any of the ready-made colours or create your own by clicking on the Define Custom Colours button.

Note: This colour is the colour used to surround your publication if a publication is run in a graphics mode larger than it was designed for e.g: a 640x480 publication in 800x600 mode. It is also used for the blank screen between pages so it can be important to set this colour even if a picture normally fills the background of your page.

You can also load a picture in any of the supported graphics formats by using the file list boxes at the bottom of the dialog to find it on your disk. Checking the Scale to Fit option will resize the picture to fill the background, with the Keep Aspect option checked the picture will not be stretched out of proportion in order to make it fit. The scale to fit option is not relevant for vector format pictures such as .WMF.

The background picture can be a texture, an illustration or a graphic which designs the publication in a certain way. It can also be Transparent in which case a chosen colour in the picture will be ignored and the background will show through. You can set this colour by clicking the Set Colour button and choosing from the palette which comes up.


Page Options: Display

This option allows you to choose a special effect with which your page will appear on screen or disappear. Simply select the effect you want from the appropriate drop down list for either Page On Effect or Page Off Effect. The effect will be automatically previewed in the box to the right and you can test either of the effects again by clicking on the Test On or Test Off buttons.

Using the Over Existing Page option (recommended) you can specify whether the page should appear over the preceding page over whether it should go to a blank screen first (the colour of this blank screen is set by the background colour setting on the Background dialog).

The Cut effect is equivalent to no effect at all. You have an on or off effect or both and they can be different.

You can set the speed of the effect using the Speed scrollbar, the higher the number the faster the effect.

Note: The speed of the effect may not be accurately previewed in the preview box. Some effects may be unsuitable for use with full pages on slower machines.


Page Options: Sound

A page can also play a piece of music or sound effect. You can set this up via the Sound tab. Use the file list boxes to find the file you want to play. You can listen to the file pressing the Audition button. A Clear button is provided to remove any existing file details if necessary.

Selecting Loop will play the file repeatedly.

Delay enables you to synchronise the sound with another event or time it for some other reason.

Stop Existing Sound will stop any background music playing but please note that two files of the same type cannot be played at the same time anyway so this is only relevant if you are playing a midi track and want to launch a WAV file or vice versa.

You can ensure that the sound does not continue when you move onto the next page by checking the Stop on Next Page option. To provide background music for your entire publication simply start a sound on the first page without checking this option and the music will continue until another button or page stops it.


Page Options: Summary

The summary allows you to switch the various other options on and off conveniently. It also allows you to make the page display for a specified length of time by clicking on the Timed checkbox and typing the time in seconds or tenths of seconds in the box provided.

This can create a rolling presentation which displays your pages without any interaction from the user or can be used with interactive pages to ensure the page moves on if the user doesn't press a button first.

Timed Page


Page View

Page View shows your publication one page at a time so that you can see the various page elements to edit them.

Moving Around Your Publication

You can work on your entire publication in Page View by moving backwards and forwards through the project using the slideshow buttons provided or Home (to jump to the first page) and End (to get to the last page).

You can also jump to any chosen page simply by selecting its title from the drop down list of page titles in the toolbar.

Zoom

Page View allows three levels of zoom - Zoom 100% (for previewing the page exactly as it will appear), Zoom 50% (so you can see the whole page with reasonable detail) and Zoom to Fit (scales the page to fit the whole page into the current window).

Most users will find it most convenient to use Zoom to Fit with both Illuminatus and the publication window maximised

The Page Elements

An Illuminatus page consists of three elements...

Page - Certain elements and functions can be applied to the whole page. You can display it for a specific length of time, select a special effect with which it will appear and/or disappear and play background music or sound. The background of a page can be coloured and/or can contain a graphic which is either an illustration or an attractive pattern or which imposes a design on the publication.

Frames - these are the boxes into which text, graphics, animations and/or slideshows can be loaded. They can have a background colour or can be transparent (select the background colour None). They can have a selection of different border types.

Buttons - these control the actions of an Illuminatus publication. Unlike standard buttons they can have multiple line captions. They can also be invisible which enables them to be used as hotspots as they are not visible but can still perform the action assigned to them and so can be placed under a graphic so that when the user clicks on the graphic he/she is clicking on the invisible button.

Editing the Page Elements

This is a comprehensive list of the commands available in Page View. Simply click on one for further information on the function.

File Menu

Save...

Save Publication

Save All Publications

Save Publication As

Save Page As

Save As Master Page

Save Page As Template

Export Page

Print

Printer Setup

Return to Publication View

Edit Menu

Add

Frame

Button

Delete

Move

To Front

To Back

Align

Left

Right

Top

Bottom

Page Menu

Zoom 50%

Zoom 100%

Zoom To Fit

Next Page

Previous Page

First Page

Last Page

Preview

Tools

Picture Editor

Word Processor

Sound Editor

Setup Tools

Window

Help

Related Topics

Preview

About Master Pages


Palette Clash

Palette clash is the appearance of strange colours or on images particularly when you change pages, when going through a slideshow or when launching a video or animation when running in 256colour mode.

This is due to the fact that any one 256 colour graphic will use all the 256 colours available. Displaying a second one which uses a different 256 colours will mean there aren't enough colours in the palette to do both. Windows will use the palette of the current picture and will automatically change to suit that picture. But in doing so the new palette will be momentarily imposed on the old image or Windows will use the closest colours for both and its colours will change, with often very psychedelic and unwanted results.

Illuminatus provides a special option which can solve the problem when you Publish or Compile your publication called OmniPalette.

Palette clashes can also occur when launching a video clip or animation.

The solution is to ensure that all your pictures have the same palette; that is, use the same 256 colours in the same position in their palette. To do this you will need a paint program or graphics utility such as Paintshop Pro.

Creating a Custom Optimal Palette.

To create a palette to avoid clashes it needs to contain the most useful colours from all the graphics. The best way to do this is to find areas in each picture which contain the most colours and cut the area out and paste it into a blank picture created in 16.7 million colour mode. Repeat this with every picture in the publication to build a mosaic of all the colours required. Then you should reduce this mosaic to 256 colours using the "optimal" palette option and Error Diffusion colour reduction method if these are available. Save the palette file and then finally, load that palette onto all your original pictures again using the Error Diffusion method if available.

Animation and Video

Palette clashes can also occur with animation and video and this is more difficult to avoid. If you are using only one movie the easy way is to get the palette from that and apply it to all your images. If you are using more than one video you could break the animation or video down into graphics of each frame using a program like Video Toolbox and then prepare a compromise palette in a similar way to that described above. Apply this compromise palette to all your animations/video and images.

If you have a lot of graphics in your publication you can reduce the amount of work this requires by optimising palettes only for pictures which are used together.

The only way to avoid palette clash entirely is to produce your publication in 16 colours or 16.7 million colours.


Paste (Page View)

 select Paste from the Edit menu [image] Ctrl + V

Pastes any buttons and/or frames currently stored on the Clipboard. All the contents and attributes are retained. The items will be pasted slightly down and to the right of their original position.

You can change move onto another page before pasting thus allowing you to transfer items between pages.

Related Topics

Paste in Original Position

Cut

Copy


Paste (Publication View)

 select Paste from the Edit menu [image] Ctrl + V

Pastes any pages currently stored on the Clipboard. The cursor will change to the one illustrated below to show that you have pages to paste. The contents of pages are copied with the page and a number is added to the page title to differentiate it from the original. You can subsequently edit the page title to suit.

Related Topics

Cut

Copy


Paste in Original Position

 select Paste in Original Position from the Edit menu [image] Ctrl +Alt+ V

As the name suggests, this function allows you to paste the clipboard objects back in the same position on the page as they were cut or copies from. This can be particularly useful for creating piles of buttons for multiple actions and for pasting the same objects in the same place on several different pages.

Paste

Cut

Copy


Pathnames

When launching additional programs or using them as parameters, or when writing or reading to and from text files using the report text and load text features Illuminatus will need to know where to look for these files. This is called the pathname for the program and will probably be different for publications in the editor and when they are published.

The best way round this is to use your computer's path during editing and Previewing and then change the pathname by typing it into the Launch this Program and With Parameter boxes according to the considerations below

If you are launching another application which you are guessing your user will have and you can guess where it might be you type in the full specific pathname. An example would be the Windows Calculator which you can be pretty confident will be in the Windows directory as calc.exe. You can therefore type c:\windows\calc.exe in the Launch this Program box. To catch users who have installed Windows on a different drive rather than C: you use \windows\calc.exe instead which will look for the Windows directory on whatever drive the program is currently being used.

Distributed Files

If you are distributing the file with your publication you only need include the program name and leave the pathname off altogether irrespective of where it is on your machine as Illuminatus will install it into the same directory as your publication when you publish your publication and so will find it there.

Relative Paths

You can tell your publication to look for the file in a subdirectory of wherever it is installed by typing a single full stop, a backslash and then the subdirectory e.g .\images\mypic.pcx could be used as a With Parameter command for ILMPIC to tell it load a picture from the images directory below the publication and it wouldn't matter where the publication had been installed.

Writing to Text Files

If you are using a text file to report text you will need to know exactly where that is so you will need to ensure the pathname is right. If you just specify the filename without a path it will be written into the current directory which will make it easier to find. But note that if your are distributing a publication which runs from CD rom you will not be able to write to that directory as the CD is read only. You may therefore want to specifically report text to C:\ to be more confident that it will be written.

However, if you are reporting text to disk to be displayed again in a scrolling text box this must be done in the publication's directory and so no pathname should be included for the Reoprt Text file.


Photo CD Slideshow

You can create a slideshow of pictures direct from a Kodak PhotoCD disk by using the From CD option on the slideshow section of the Frame Options dialog. Please note, however, that PhotoCD images are high colour images and will not display properly in 16 or 256 colour modes. If you want to display PhotoCD images in these modes do not use the From CD option and Illuminatus will incorporate them the publication and optimise their appearance for whatever colour mode you are compiling or publising to.


Picture Editor

This option allows you to launch your favourite paint program to create or edit graphics without leaving Illuminatus. When you have finished editing or creating the picture save it to disk ready for use in Illuminatus.

You can save it in any of the formats supported by Illuminatus.

If you edit a file you are already using in Illuminatus the copy in your publication will be automatically updated.

Related Topics

Graphics

Setup Tools


Play Sound

This item on the Summary of the Button Options dialog instructs the button to play a sound file as set up via the Button Options: Sound tab.

Sound & Music

Sound Editor


PopUp Frame Option

This checkbox on the Frame Option: Summary is the option which tells Illuminatus to treat your frame as a popup frame. If you switch this on Illuminatus will automatically create a title for the frame if you haven't already done so as without a title the frame is not visible when you come to use the Button Options to Show Frame or Hide Frame.

PopUp Frames


PopUp Frames

You can now set Illuminatus frames to appear on command. These are called popup frames. They are displayed by buttons set to Show Frame and can be hidden again by buttons programmed to Hide Frame.

There is no need to hide popup frames before leaving a page as they are automatically closed when the publication moves on.

Popup frames can contain any of the elements in a standard frame the difference being that they will not be visible until a button is used to display it. The transparency option cannot be used with popup frames. If you want irregularly-shaped pop up frames you should create the background manually or using Export Page or you can use slideshows.

These are obviously useful for displaying further information on demand, displaying a related picture or a definition of a particular term and so on.

To create popup frames which display for a particular length of time see Step-by-Step Timer


Preferences

 select Preferences from the File menu

Allows you to control several aspects of the way Illuminatus works.

Make Backups When Saving - Whenever you save a publication Illuminatus can keep a backup of the previous version for you to revert to if necessary. The backup is stored in the same directory and filename as the original but has the .bak ending. You can revert to this version by renaming it to [filename.mpb].

Thumbnails in Publication View - Creates a miniature image of your page and displays this in Publication View in place of the standard page icon. It can slow the program down on slower machines.

Show Bitmaps While Editing - Allows you to hide the graphics on your page while you are editing it in Page View and so speed up operation of the program. The pictures will still display in Preview.

Show Start Up Dialog - Allows you to launch Illuminatus straight into publication view without the prompts on the title page.

Help Tag Colour - Allows you to choose your own colour for the help tags which appear over the toolbar to prompt you of the use for the button.

Background Music - Allows you to play background music while you work in Illuminatus. Obviously this music stops while you preview your publication.

Initial Zoom - Allows you to specify the zoom setting which Illuminatus will start in when it switches to Page View. You can select any of the options available as your default or the program can remember the last zoom used.


Preview

 select Preview from the Publication or Page menu.  F5

This function allows you to preview your publication. It runs the publication as it will be displayed on your reader's machine and allows you to view the design and test buttons and so on.

You can run Preview from both Publication View and Page View by pressing F5.

Please note: Preview is still referring to the original files to create your publication and so is considerably slower than the final version will be. This is particularly true if you are using large compressed graphics such as jpg and PhotoCD as these take time to process during preview but not in the finished publication. To accurately preview the speed of your publication you should compile it and run that version outside the editor.

Most .ILX extensions cannot be tested in Preview mode and simply will not work as they need a finished publication to refer to. Again you should compile your publication and test that.


Previous Page

 select Next Page from the Page menu.	PageUp

Takes you to the preceding page in the current publication.

You can use the Page Up key as an shortcut/alternative.

You can also move to any page in your publication by selecting its title from the drop down list box in the toolbar in Page View.

Related Topics

Zoom 50%

Zoom 100%

Zoom To Fit

Next Page

First Page

Last Page

Preview


Print (Page View)

 select Print from the File menu in Page View	Ctrl+P

Prints a preview version of the current page to the current Windows printer. For printers using A4 paper the output will look best if the printer is setup in landscape mode.

Printing

Print (Publication View)


Print (Publication View)

 select Print from the File menu in Publication View	Ctrl+P

Prints your whole publication or a range of pages from your publication, one page per printed page, to the current Windows printer. For printers using A4 paper the output will look best if the printer is setup in landscape mode.

Printing

Print (Page View)


Print Page

This option on the Summary section of Button Options dialog lets you tell a button to print a copy of the current page. Please note that this process prints a graphic of the page and may therefore take time to print. You may therefore prefer to use the Print File option available to print a text file.


Printer Setup

 select Printer Setup from the File menu in Publication View

Allows access to the standard Windows Printer Setup dialog to control your printing options. For printers using A4 paper output from Illuminatus will look best if the printer is setup in landscape mode.

Print (Page View)

Print (Publication View)


Printing

You have now two ways in which your publication can print material. You can instruct a button to print a graphic of the current page by selecting the Print Page option. Or you can print a text file by using the Print File option on Button Options: Report

In both cases these functions will print to the default Windows printer.


Publication

This menu provides the tools of building and publishing your publication.

Publication Options

Installation Setup

Insert Blank Page

Insert Page Template

Insert Page

Insert Master Page

Compile

Publish

Preview


Publication Directory

The dialog which comes up when you click on Browse Directories from the Compile or Publish dialog allows you to locate an existing directory into which your publication will be Compiled or Published. Simply use the drive list box to select the relevant drive (if necessary) and then select the directory where you want the publication built.

Note: We strongly recommend that you create your compiled or published version in a separate directory. In particular publishing to a directory which already contains files will cause those files to be included in you publication causing, at the very least, wasted disk space.

Compile

Publish


Publication Options

 select Publication Options from the Publication menu

This set of dialogs lets you set up options which apply across the whole publication.

Click on the item you want further details on.

Related Topics

Preferences

Installation Setup


Publication Options: Closedown

 select Publication Options from the Publication menu

The Publication Options allow you to set up options which will apply across the whole publication.

Closedown is the overall term for the way your multimedia will close when it is Exited or when the user closes it using a button you have provided for the purpose by checking the closedown option.

You can play a sound file or piece of music by clicking the Play Sound checkbox. Find the file you want using the Browse button and try it using the Audition button.

You can also display an end page by selecting it from the dropdown list of those available in the publication and then clicking on the Show Page checkbox. You can set how long it will be displayed for by typing the number of seconds in the For box provided.

A typical use for the end page would be a copyright notice, a thank you or a reminder of how to order or who to contact for further details.

Note: Do not include a button programmed to go to Closedown as you closedown page or you will lock your publication into a loop. Closedown pages should always be timed pages either by setting the Timed option in Page Options or by typing a display period here.


Publication Options: Cursors

The Publication Options allow you to set up options which will apply across the whole publication.

You can now set special cursors for your publication to use. A number are provided with Illuminatus or you can create your own if you have access to a resource editor such as those which comes with programming languages.

There are three states you can set cursors for

Normal

This is the cursor which will simply indicate the position of the mouse pointer when the others are not used.

Busy

This is used when the system is doing something and is usually the familiar egg timer cursor.

Select

This cursor is used when there is something to be clicked on.

Use the appropriate Browse button to find a cursor for each type as appropriate. If you don't select one for a particular state the default Windows one will be used. The default Windows cursors are also supplied with Illuminatus so you can reset to the defaults by loading these in in place of your custom ones. The default Select and Normal cursor is included as arrow1.cur and the default busy cursor is provided as busy.cur.

Ordinarily under Windows both Select and Normal are the same arrow shape but they are separated here to allow you to have special cursors to signify when there is a hotspot or hidden button on the page so users do not miss buttons which do not look like buttons.


Publication Options: Exit

The Publication Options allow you to set up options which will apply across the whole publication.

This option sets how users can exit from you publication without pressing a button which has been programmed to close the publication using the Closedown option.

You can select the Esc and/or Alt+F4 as keystrokes to interrupt and close the publication by clicking on the box(es) as appropriate.

There are several circumstances under which you might also want to ensure that no unauthorised people could interrupt your publication and Illuminatus allows you to protect the exit of your publication via a password which you can set and update by simply typing the required password into the Password box provided.

Note: The Password option does not prevent users closing a publication using an exit button programmed with the Closedown option. You will need to create this option specially if this the effect you want to achieve.


Publication Options: General

The Publication Options allow you to set up options which will apply across the whole publication.

Reset

Allows you to set up the time your publication waits before automatically resetting itself. Further Details.

Default Transparent Colour

This allows you to set up the colour which will be used for making graphics transparent unless you change it for particular graphics in the places provided. Further Details.


Publication View

Publication View is an overview of your entire publication showing all the pages in it.

If you have no pages in your publication the screen will look like this.

You can add pages by clicking on the Insert New Page button on the toolbar and then clicking on your publication window.

Each page is represented by a miniature representation of the actual page (or an icon if Preview Thumbnails is off) and a title. You edit the title by typing it into the box provided on the toolbar in Page View.

To edit a page simply double click on it in Publication View. If the page is already selected you can simply press Enter.

You can switch backwards and forwards between Page View and Publication View by pressing F4.

Here is a list of the commands available in Publication View. Simply click on any of them for further information on their function

File

New...

New Publication

New Publication from Template

Open Publication

Save...

Save Publication

Save Publication As

Save All Publications

Save Publication As Template

Close Publication

Data Files

Check Location

Change Data Drive

Consolidate Project

Print

Printer Setup

Summary Info

Preferences

Exit

Edit

Cut

Copy

Paste

Delete

Select All

Deselect All

Edit Selected Page

Publication

Publication Options

Installation Setup

Insert Blank Page

Insert Page Template

Insert Page

Insert Master Page

Compile

Publish

Preview

Tools

Picture Editor

Word Processor

Sound Editor

Setup Tools

Window

Help

Further Information

Selecting and Moving Pages

Multiple Publications

About Templates

Related Topics

Preferences

Installation Setup

Publication Options

Preview

Page View


Publish

This option allows you to produce an independent multimedia publication for distribution to other computer users. It gathers all the files you have used together, allows you to add others if you wish and then bundles everything together, compresses it all and writes a setup program to install it on your reader's computer.

Although the published version of the program is intended for distribution on floppy disk you should publish it onto your hard disk. and then copy it to the floppy using File Manager. This is much faster and means you have a reference copy of the publication on your disk.

Disk1, Disk2 Subdirectories

The Publish operation will break the complete publication into pieces of the correct size for the disk you are publishing it for. It then places each of these sections into a separate subdirectory in the directory you chose so that they are easily separated. These subdirectories are called disk1, disk2 etc. To copy your publication to floppy simply copy the files contained in these subdirectories to the first, second, third floppy disk of your publication as required.

Larger Than Floppy Publications

If you want a publication to fit on a removable hard disk, an optical drive, tape drive or other medium with larger capacity than the floppy options provided you can either Compile it and then copy the working version to the large capacity media or you can Publish the publication to 1.44Mb floppies and simply copy all the resulting data files to the same location on the large capacity media. The setup program will ask for disk2, disk3, etc but you can simply press Enter as the data files will be there already.

What You Need To Do Before Publishing

If you have not saved your publication you will need to do so. You will also need to give your multimedia publication a title before you Compile or Publish it. This is not the same as the filename for the publication it is the title used in the menu bar and is required by Illuminatus to set up the data for your publication. Illuminatus will remind you about these two requirements if you try to publish or compile without them. (See Installation Setupfor further details.)

Step-by-Step Publish

Related Topics

Compile

Installation Setup

Publication Options


Quick Start

The Welcome Screen of Illuminatus allows you to go straight to where you want to begin work. Simply click on the button for the starting place you require...

 will open a File Open dialog to let you open an existing publication or to load a sample or tutorial file.

 will open a New and entirely blank publication.

 will open a skeleton publication known as a Publication Template.

 (at the bottom of the dialog) will open the last file you used which is given in the box alongside.

If you are starting a New publication you are asked what size you want it to be. Choose from 640x480 (standard VGA), 800x600(Super VGA) or 1024x768 by clicking the appropriate radio button.

The Illuminatus Editor starts up in Publication View  in which the main editor window contains a publication window within it which provides an overview of your publication with all the pages displayed as icons or thumbnails. For a new publication it will be empty and waiting for you to add pages.

You can build your publication from any combination of pages and page templates which you can insert from those options on the Publication Menu or using the relevant buttons on the toolbar. You then click in your publication window at the point where you want the pages inserted. You can insert blank pages and draw in the frames and buttons you need or choose from a wide selection of skeleton pages (page templates) is provided for you if you prefer.

Double click on any page to edit it. This takes you into Page View where each page of your publication is displayed as a rectangle (or part of it depending on the size of your screen and your Zoom setting)

Double click on the background to edit the basics of the page, its colour or background picture, to attach a sound or music, to display it with a special effect or for a certain length of time.

Page Options

To add frames or buttons select Add|Frame or Add|Button from the Edit menu or click the appropriate button on the toolbar. Click on your page where you want the top left corner of your frame or button and then drag down and right to create the object.

To reposition a frame or button simply drag it to where you want it to be. To reshape and resize a button or frame drag one of the eight handles which appear around it when selected to create the shape required.

Editing Page Elements

Double click on a frame to load its contents, colour, picture, animation, slideshow, text etc, to alter its precise size and location and its border style.

Frame Options

Double click on a button to give it a caption and connect it to an event (launching a video, slideshow, animation or moving to another page, etc.) and to alter its precise size and location.

Button Options

Preview the complete document using the Preview button.

Preview

Save your publication to disk using Save Publication As from the Save submenu of the File menu or use Consolidate Project to save your publication and copy all the files it needs into the same directory for convenience.

Once you have completed your document you can produce an independent program by compiling it on to your hard disk or publishing it onto floppy disks (from the Publication menu). Set your Installation Setup and Publication Options to specify a title for your publication and the details to build it into a distributable form. You can choose an icon for your publication and create it in mono, sixteen, 256 or 16.7million colours and Illuminatus will handle any colour changes automatically.

Compile

Publish

NOW READ

About Colour Modes

Important Considerations


Read This First

New Features Added Since the Manual Went to Press...

Nudge

Illuminatus now includes a nudge function which allows you to move selected objects one pixel at a time in any direction using the arrow keys.

Centre Alignment

There are now two new commands on the Align menu... Centre Vertically and Centre Horizontally for cent ring selected objects above or alongside each other.

Graphical Button - Clear

There is now a Clear button on the Graphical button dialog which enables you to remove any graphics from the three button states. Simply select the button state you want cleared and press the clear button.

Enter to Edit

You can hit the Enter key to bring up the Frame Options or Button Options dialogs when you have the appropriate object selected.

Change Graphics File Extension

This is enables you to tell Illuminatus to look for different format files to the ones originally loaded into the publication. (See Change Graphics File Extension for further details.)

Scrolling Text Boxes

Scrolling text boxes can now be used to display scores and information from the user. They only display scrollbars if required so single line text can be displayed without scrollbars. This enables you to display output from Report Text or the ILMScore.ILX in the publication itself. Please note, however, that that the scrolling text boxes look for their text in the publication directory only so the files you want to read should have not pathnames associated with them. This also means that this will not work with publications being run from CD-Rom. Also note that because of text spacing settings both in Illuminatus and some True Type font definitions the size of frame a single line needs before it does not require scrollbars is considerable.

Compile Copies Additional Programs

Compile nows copies any files listed in the Programs section of the Installation Setup.You can use this to copy across any data or text files your program needs. The sample publications provided on the Illuminatus CD illustrate this point.

Technical Update

Disk Space

The most frequent cause of problems with Illuminatus is users running out of disk space while Illuminatus is in the middle of something. If you experience problems with Illuminatus check your disk space and other system resources and try again.

This is particularly true when Compiling and Publishing. For this reason we have introduced some messages to warn you if you are getting low on disk space. Please note that this is only a warning and small publications may still fit into the space you have available. You will also be told if the Compile/Publish failed to complete properly but the advance warning, we hope will help stop the frustration of compiling a large publication only to find it has failed because of lack of disk space.

Save Compressed

Publications saved in compressed form using Save Compressed can still be opened and edited in Illuminatus without being decompressed they just take longer to open.

Selecting Objects

You cannot select objects through other objects. You must bring the object to the front, if necessary by sending the other object to the back. This is also true of the editing handles relating to objects so beware of this when trying to edit objects immediately alongside each other as they do not look as though they overlap but their editing handles may be "underneath" the neighbouring object and will not be selected.

Deselecting Objects

You cannot deselect individual objects in a group by Shift+clicking on them again. You must cancel the selection and start again.

Moving Multiple Objects

To move multiple objects keep Shift pressed down while you drag the objects but note that only the outline of one object will be drawn while you're moving. When you release the mouse button all the objects you have selected will be redrawn in the new positions.

You can select, resize and move more than one object at a time. Working with Multiple Objects.

PopUp Frames

Transaprency does not work in pop up frames. To recreate the effect use export page and crop out a graphic for the background of your frame.

Editing Page Titles

Please note that you must press the Tick button to record any changes you make to the Page Title. Pressing Enter or clicking elsewhere will leave the new Page Title in place only for as long as you stay on that page and will not be stored until you press the tick.

Page Templates in Publications over 640x480

All the page templates provided with the program are designed for use at 640x480 as the lowest common denominator. You can, of course, resize them to higher resolutions using the resize multiple objects

OmniPalette

OmniPalette only works in compiled or published publications, it does not improve the quality of Preview nor will it work on images which are accessed directly from CD at runtime using the From CD option.

Preview Limitations

The speed and graphics quality of Preview of your publication in the Illuminatus editor can vary quite considerably from the final publication if you are using compressed graphics files (e.g JPG) or if you are using 16million colour graphics (e.g:PhotoCD) in 256 colour mode and such like. We recommend you compile your publication to test it properly.

Almost all the extension programs supplied with Illuminatus require a compiled or published publication to function so will fail if used during Preview.

Drive List Boxes

The drive list boxes at the bottom of some sections of the frame option and button option dialogs sometime confuse the user because the file and pathname for the file used in that section may be different to the path the list boxes are actually displaying. If this confuses you as to what the list boxes are showing simply refresh the information by changing the List Files of Type or changing the directory until you can establish where you are.

Recommended SetUp

For ease of use we recommend that you run Illuminatus in 64k or 16.7million colour graphics mode for the majority of the time. The best resolution is 800x600 which allows you to work on (almost) a whole 640x480 page at 100% zoom. Maximise the Illuminatus Editor window and your publication window within that and view your page at 100%.

Then compile or publish down to 256 or 16 colours using the OmniPalette option for the former. You can then change down to 256 colour mode and/or 640x480 to test your publication and work on tidying any remaining display-related problems. About Colour Modes

Printing Limitations

The Illuminatus printing option is intended primarily for text output and black and white images and may not produce acceptable results with colour images or colour printers. If you wish to provide printout of product information etc create an optimised black and white image using Paintshop Pro and print this.

Technical Information...

Keyboard Support

Please note that Illuminatus requires a mouse throughout. This is augmented by keyboard shortcuts such Ctrl+V (for Paste) and F5 for Preview. The program does not provide full keyboard support for dialog options.

Palettes

If you are publishing to 256colours and are not using OmniPalette you should ensure that the background of your page or the first graphical frame has the palette you want to use. If this image has limited colours fill the spaces up with colours used in other pictures for better results. If you have optimised your palettes manually this probably won't be necessary.

Related Information

Important Considerations

Other Hints and Tips


Recreating Standard Presentation Effects

Illuminatus can produce a presentation similar in style to standard presentation packages by using timed pages displayed with special effects and slideshows for all the elements of a "slide". Slideshows can consist of only one picture and so (with the Delay option) allow for timed display of elements on your page. If you want to use text in this way you should convert your text to graphics as follows.

Load a template or create a page for a bulleted list. Load a background and colour each of the bullet and text frames appropriately. Type in the bullets and text as required. Now save this page as a independent bitmap graphic using Export Page from the Page menu. Take the bitmap into Paintbrush/Paintshop Pro and cut each of the elements out and save them to disk as individual picture.

Now replace the text in the Illuminatus frames with slideshows displaying a single bitmap version of the text. By setting the delay for each frame differently the bullet points can appear in any order your require.

This can be used in both self-displaying and interactive publications.


Redo

 select Redo from the Edit menu in Page View	Ctrl+Y

Allows you to redo something you have just undone with Undo. Useful if you find you have undone too much.

Undo


Reference Guide

Click on one of the following topics for a comprehensive reference on that subject.

Publication View

Page View

Button Options

Page Options

Frame Options

Preview

Compile

Publish

Installation Setup

Publication Options

Preferences

Commands

Resources and Data Files


Report Text

This option on the Summary of the Button Options dialog allows you to set the button to report text to disk or printer as set up via the Button Options: Report tab.


Reset

 select Publication Options from the Publication menu

There are circumstances where you may want your publication to automatically reset. If, for example, your publication is being used in public a user might leave the publication halfway through on an inappropriate page and you would want the publication to reset back to, say, the contents page. This option enables you to set that up.

You can type in a time which the publication will wait until it resets by typing it into the box labelled Reset After.

If you want the publication to close when it resets click on the Closedown radio button OR if you want it to go to a particular page in the publication click the Goto Page option and select a page from the drop down list to the right.

You can also set a sound file to play at that time by finding the sound file you want using the Browse button (clicking the Audition button will let you hear the sound when you've selected one) and then clicking the Play Sound checkbox.

Tip: When setting the reset time interval allow plenty of time to read your most verbose page or you could reset the publication while the user is still using it which will result in frustration and annoyance.

Closedown


Resources & Data Files

The main focus of  this version of Illuminatus is to provide a quick and easy way to bring together all the multimedia resources which are now available.

Illuminatus supports all major graphics formats as well as industry-standard formats for music, video and animations; and thereby enables you to immediately utilise all your existing resources in your multimedia documents.

Links with Resources

Illuminatus uses most resources directly from the original files on your hard disk. This ensures that any changes you make to graphics, or animations will be automatically reflected in the multimedia publication using them.

You can check that all the graphics, animations, sound and video files used in your publication have not been deleted or lost by using the Check Location option from the Data Files submenu on the File menu. This option gives you the chance to check and reassign the location of your resource files.

If you edit a publication which was originally started on another drive or if the resources in your publication are label led with a different drive you can use the Change Drive option to correct this. Suppose, for example, you are trying to edit a publication on your "C" drive which was originally on a CD Rom in your "D" drive and so expects to find all its resources on D:\. Use Change Drive to update the links with resource files to reflect the change of drive while retaining any directory and subdirectory information.

To help you maintain you project easily and ensure all the files you need for a publication are available to it Illuminatus includes an invaluable function which copies all the resource files the publication uses into the same directory as the editable file. This the Consolidate Project option on the Data Files submenu. Data Files

Text is stored by the program. If you want Illuminatus to refer to a separate disk-based text file you should save the file to disk yourself using the Save button on Frame Options: Text.

Links with Other Programs

You can launch programs to edit your text files, graphics and sound files from within Illuminatus using the appropriate options on the Tools menu. The default set up uses the programs which come free with Illuminatus or with Windows namely, Write (for word processing), PaintShop Pro (for picture editing) and ILMWaved (for sound editing). You can, however, change these to suit your own particular favourites by using the Setup Tools option on the bottom of the Tools menu.

Remember when using word processors to create and edit text for your Illuminatus frames that you must save or export the file as basic DOS or ASCII text.

Text

Graphics

Sound

Moving Images


Return to Publication View

 select Return to Publication View from the File menu

Returns you to the overview of your publication from page editing mode.


Right

 select Align from the Edit menu in Page View

Selecting this option will align the righthand edge of all selected items with the righthand edge of the object furthest to the right.

Left

Top

Bottom

Centre Vertically

Centre Horizontally


Rolling Publications

In addition to creating interactive multimedia documents Illuminatus makes it simple to create stylish self-displaying publications and demonstrations. Simply design the publication you require just as with any other multimedia publication, and then specify the length of time each page will display by type a value in seconds into the Timed box on the Summary of the Page Options dialog.

This allows you to set up the intervals in tenths of a second between each page and the way in which the publication can be interrupted.

If you want animations, video or slideshows to appear in your self-displaying publication you need to set the AutoStart option for these elements (with a Delay if required). Don't forget to set the timing of the page long enough to let the animations finish.

By combining slideshows containing just one frame you can produce most standard presentation styles.

Recreating Standard Presentation Effects


Save All Publications

Saves all the publications you currently have open to disk under their  existing filenames without further ado. If any are untitled a standard Save As.. dialog will appear for you to specify a location and filename.

Save Publication

Save Publication As...

Save Publication as Template

Save Compressed Publication

Save All Publications


Save As Master Page

 select Save As Master Page from the File menu

Saves the currently selected page to disk via a standard Windows file dialog as a master page.

About Master Pages


Save As... Dialog

This is a standard Save File dialog which allows you to select a location and filename for saving your publication.

Use the drive and directory list boxes to find the location for the file and then type a filename into the filename box. Saved publications are automatically given the extension .mpb.

If this dialog appears when you have selected Save or Save All Publications it means that a publication was untitled.

Save Publication

Save Publication As...

Save Publication as Template

Save Compressed Publication

Save All Publications

Save Page As

Save Page As Template

Save As Master Page


Save Compressed Publication

 select Save Compressed Publication from the File menu

This option allows you to save your publication .mpb file in compressed form which will save disk space and is particularly recommended for large publications. You can load a compressed publication using Open Publication in exactly the same way as an uncompressed publication. The only difference is that compressed publications take longer to save and load than uncompressed ones.

You do not have to always save a publication in the format it was first saved in. We recommend that from time to time you save your publication while editing it and that for this you use the ordinary save. Then when you have finished work on the publication or are closing Illuminatus you can use Save Compressed Publication to save disk space.

Save Publication

Save Publication As...

Save Publication as Template

Save Compressed Publication

Save All Publications


Save Page As

 select Save Page As from the File menu

Saves the currently selected page to disk via a standard Windows file dialog to allow you to give it filename.


Save Page As Template

 select Save Page as Template from the File menu

This option allows you to save the design of frames and buttons on the current page to disk as a template which can then be used in future publications via the Insert Page Template option. The page can be based on one of the templates supplied with the program or can be one you have created from scratch.

If you want to be able to filter your templates from all the others using the List Files of Type option the first three letters of the filename for the template must be USR.


Save Publication

 select Save Publication from the File menu	Ctrl+S

Saves the currently selected publication to disk under its existing filename without further ado. If it is untitled you will be asked for a filename.

Save Publication As...

Save Publication as Template

Save Compressed Publication

Save All Publications


Save Publication As

Saves the currently selected publication to disk via a standard Windows file dialog to allow you to give it (new) filename.

Save Publication

Save Publication as Template

Save Compressed Publication

Save All Publications


Save Publication As Template

Enables the current publication to be saved to disk as a skeleton publication on which to base future projects. Only the templates for each page are saved. No text, captions or contents are saved.

This option is useful where you regularly use a consistent layout but with different content.

Master Pages should be used where some of the content is also consistent. About Master Pages

Save Publication

Save Publication As...

Save Compressed Publication

Save All Publications


Search

This is a powerful new feature of Illuminatus which allows your user to search the publication for particular information. You program a button to launch the search dialog for the user to select the word they are interested in and then select the appropriate page to view.

You can set up the Index for the search when you come to Compile or Publish your publication. Illuminatus automatically creates an index of the significant words and the pages they appear on in your publication so you do not have to set up an index manually if you don't want to and if all the words you want in the index are in the text of the publication itself.

The Illuminatus Search function is contained in a .DLL which is automatically distributed with any publication which requires it. It therefore does not increase the size of a publication which doesn't need it.

Creating an Index for Search


Search (Button Option)

This radio button on the Button Options: Summary page tells the program to launch the search dialog to allow the user access to an index for the publication which you can set up via the Compile or Publish dialogs.

Search


Select All

 select Select All from the Edit menu	Ctrl+A

Quickly selects all the pages in a publication.

Useful for when you want to Copy the whole of a publication ready to Paste it into another.

Related Topics

Selecting and Moving Pages


Selecting Frames and Buttons

You can select a frame or button by clicking on it. If you want to select more than one object press Shift while clicking. Clicking again while Shift is still pressed down will remove the item from the selection group. You can select multiple items by holding down the Shift key while clicking on the objects required. Only Delete and Align work on multiple objects.

Moving

To move the frames or buttons on a page you simply click on them and drag them to wherever you want them to be. You can drag multiple objects by holding down the Shift key while dragging the objects around.

Resizing

If you want to resize existing frames and buttons there are eight small black "handles" on the corners and in the middle of each side which appear when you click on the frame or button. The cursor will change to a set of arrows when you are over these handles. Click and drag on these to alter the size and shape of the element.

You can also edit the size and shape of buttons and frames by typing in the appropriate figures in the Top, Left, Width, Height boxes on the Summary dialog.

You can delete any frame or button, together with its contents by pressing the Delete key or choosing Delete from the Edit menu in Page View.


Selecting and Moving Pages

Selecting pages in Illuminatus works just like multiple selection in File Manager and other Windows programs.

You can select any single page by clicking on it with a single mouse click.

To select a range of pages click on the first page. Then hold down the Shift key and select the last page in the batch. All the intervening pages will be automatically selected.

To pick a scattered selection of pages click on the first page, hold down the Ctrl key and then click on all the other pages you want in the batch individually.

In all the above cases to deselect a page simply click on it again. If there are multiple pages selected and you are pressing Ctrl only that file will be deselected.

To quickly select all the pages in a publication use Select All from the Edit menu option. There is a similar option to Deselect All if you need it.

You can cut, paste, delete, save and print the pages you have selected.

To reorder your pages simply select the page you want to move and drag it to where you want it placed.


Setup Tools

 select Setup Tools from the Tools menu

This option allows you to setup your favourite word processor, paint program and sound editor to use to edit your multimedia resources via the Tools menu without leaving Illuminatus.

The default settings are to use the programs which come with Windows namely; Write, Paintbrush and Sound Recorder. You can change them by using the appropriate Browse button to find the filename for the program you want to use.

So, for example, to replace Paintbrush with Corel PhotoPaint you choose Setup Tools, then click the Browse button alongside the Paint Program box. Search through the directories to find CORELPNT.EXE, select that and then press OK. Now every time you choose Picture Editor from the Tools menu Illuminatus will launch Corel PhotoPaint.


Show Frame

This option on the Summary page of the Button Options dialog enables you to instruct a button to display a frame which has been set as a popup frame by checking the popup frame checkbox on the Frame Options: Summary dialog. Click the Show Frame checkbox and then select the frame you want by clicking on its title in the drop down list of those available the right of the checkbox.


Size

Illuminatus now allows you to create publications to suit the three most popular display sizes...

640x480 (VGA)

800x600 (Super VGA)

1024x768

You select which size you want when you being a new publication by clicking on the appropriate radio button.

Publications are always centred on screen so when publications are displayed on screen resolutions greater than their size they appear in the middle of the screen surrounded by the background colour of the page. However, when they are displayed on screen resolutions smaller than their size only the centre of the page will be visible.


Slideshows

Illuminatus can display a series of bitmaps in the form of a slideshow. These can be the same size or they can be different sizes. They can simply be a presentation of related images or can be the frames of an animation. They can be displayed transparently in which they will appear over the background of the page and/or over any preceding slides which give you the opportunity of building up layered graphics such as wiring diagrams and maps.


Sound & Music

Sound and music can make a most effective impact on your multimedia publication but you and your end user need a specialised sound card to enjoy the effect although you can persuade the PC speaker to play sound effects using a special Speaker Driver program which is available from bulletin boards and shareware libraries if a sound card is unavailable.

However, there is no need to do two versions of a multimedia publication or to avoid music because you are not sure all your users will have a sound card. Your multimedia publication will not crash if it can't play the music it will simply carry on silently.

You can stop a music file by assigning a button to play a sound without giving it a .MID file to play, i.e: by playing an empty sound.

Sound

Microsoft's .WAV audio format is best used for short spot effects rather than background music as it does not operate very well on sound files over 60 seconds long. Indeed, files are best restricted to 4 secs if possible as this ensures they are used in one chunk. The length of this chunk can be extended to 8 seconds via the Setup option for the MCI Sound driver in the Drivers section of the Windows Control Panel but your readers will need to have it similarly setup if you are to rely on it.

The possible consequence of an audio file too large for this buffer is that if your multimedia publication is doing something else at the same time (an animation, demo or similar) particularly if it is reading from the hard disk the sound file may stop and start.

Music

The industry-standard MIDI format is the best option for adding background music to your publication as Midi files can be any length and do not require the large amounts of system resources which WAV files can need.

You can add background music to your publication by starting the music on your first page (via the Sound item on the Page Options dialog) and switching off the Stop on Next Page option.

Most professional musicians are familiar with this format and compose for it and there is a good deal of good quality Midi music available from third-parties or public domain.

The limitation of this format is that rather than record the actual sound of an instrument it is a series of instructions which are sent to the digital instruments (voices) built into your sound card. Some of these mimic the instruments they are meant to be very well while others do not. This is particularly true of drums, trumpets and stringed instruments. If a piece of midi music uses instruments your sound card doesn't support very well the results can be appalling.

The most popular range of soundcards is the SoundBlaster series and if you are distributing your publication widely it will be as well to ensure it sounds best on the SoundBlaster.

To get even better quality from the SoundBlaster Pro cards a special driver is available from the manufacturer which considerably improves the quality of the instrumentation under Windows.

All the midi music supplied with Illuminatus is intended for optimised for such a setup.

Graphics

Moving Images

Text


Sound Editor

This option allows you to launch your favourite sound or music editor to create or edit sound or music files without leaving Illuminatus. When you have finished editing or creating the audio file save it to disk ready for use in Illuminatus.

If you edit a file you are already using in Illuminatus the copy in your publication will be automatically updated

The default setting is to use the Wave Editor supplied free with Illuminatus. You can change this setting using the Setup Tools option on the Tools menu.

Related Topics

Sound

Setup Tools


Start AVI, MPG, FLC
Start AVI, MPG, FLI

Launches an Autodesk FLI or FLC animation, .MPEG movie or video file chosen by selecting its title from the drop down list. You must have set up a frame with a video or animation file in for the button to refer to.

Moving Images


Start Slideshow

This option launches a slideshow previously set up in a frame on the same page. You must have already set up the slideshow and given it a title to be able to see it in the drop down list.

Click the radio button to activate this option and then select the title for the slideshow you want to start from the drop down list of those available alongside.

Slideshows


Step-by-Step

Click on the procedure you want step-by-step instructions on.

Compile

Publish

Timer

Text Input


Step-by-Step Compile

Compile creates an independent version of your publication which runs outside the Illuminatus Editor. When you run it a dialog appears. This is what to do with each of the components of that dialog. You can use the Cancel button to get out of the dialog at any time.

Filename: Type in here a name for the program part of your publication e.g: mypub.exe. It can be up to eight characters long and cannot contain spaces. You do not have to type .exe because if you don't want to as Illuminatus will automatically add it if you don't. Titles and Filenames.

Directory: This is the directory where your compiled publication will be stored e.g: c:\pubs. It is NOT the directory where your publication will be installed by the user as this is not relevant for a compiled publication and this is set up via Installation Setup. If you want to create a new directory for the publication simply type it in here and Illuminatus will automatically create it for you. If you want to use a directory which already exists use the Browse Directories button to find it.

Output: Choose which colour mode you want to produce your publication in by clicking the appropriate radio button. If you have bought any of our publishers for other operating systems (e.g: DOS or MAC) you will be able to output for that operating system by selecting from the drop down list on the right. About Colour Modes

OmniPalette: Use this option if you want Illuminatus to use an optimised palette for all your graphics and therefore avoid palette clash. OmniPalette is specially designed to produce acceptable results on the widest range of illustrations but if your illustrations are all very similar and contain mostly similar colours the OmniPalette option may be too much of a compromise. In this instance you can optimise the palette manually.

Compress Individual Pages: Use this option to compress the pages of your publication if required. The pages will take up less disk space when compressed but will take slightly longer to load.

Search: If you have used a button to launch a Search in your publication you will need to set up the index this function searches and the page references it presents. You do this by clicking on the button to setup the keyword list. (If you haven't used Search in your publication this option will be disabled). Creating an Index.

And Finally: Once you have made your choices for the above options you can click on OK. This will build an independent copy of your publication in whatever Directory you told it to. When its finished you can run the independent program by looking in that directory and running the program with the Filename you gave.

Titles and Filenames


Step-by-Step Publish

Publish creates an independent version of your publication which runs outside the Illuminatus Editor and then bundles all the files together, chops it up into disk-sized chunks and tops it off with a setup program which will install your publication onto your user's computer.

When you run it a dialog appears. This is what to do with each of the components of that dialog. You can use the Cancel button to get out of the dialog at any time.

Filename: Type in here a name for the program part of your publication e.g: mypub.exe. It can be up to eight characters long and cannot contain spaces. You do not have to type .exe because if you don't want to as Illuminatus will automatically add it if you don't. Titles and Filenames.

Directory: This is the directory where your published publication will be stored e.g: c:\publish\mypub. You do not publish your publication directly to the floppy disks but onto your own computer from where you can subsequently copy it to floppy as required.. If you want to create a new directory for the publication simply type it in here and Illuminatus will automatically create it for you. If you want to use a directory which already exists use the Browse Directories button to find it.

Default Installation Directory

Disk Size

These two items remind you of where your publication will be installed on your user's computer (unless they change it) and the size of disk Illuminatus will use when dividing the publication up into pieces to fit disk. These options are set via Installation Setup which you can access from here by clicking on the Setup button.

Output: Choose which colour mode you want to produce your publication in by clicking the appropriate radio button. For further information on which to choose read About Colour Modes  If you have bought any of our publishers for other operating systems (e.g: DOS or MAC) you will be able to output for that operating system by selecting from the Target System drop down list on the right.

OmniPalette: Use this option if you want Illuminatus to use an optimised palette for all your graphics and therefore avoid palette clash. OmniPalette is specially designed to produce acceptable results on the widest range of illustrations but if your illustrations are all very similar and contain mostly similar colours the OmniPalette option may be too much of a compromise. In this instance you can optimise the palette manually.

Compress Individual Pages: Use this option to compress the pages of your publication if required. The pages will take up less disk space when compressed but will take slightly longer to load.

Search: If you have used a button to launch a Search in your publication you will need to set up the index this function searches and the page references it presents. You do this by clicking on the button to setup the keyword list. (If you haven't used Search in your publication this option will be disabled). Creating an Index.

And Finally: Once you have made your choices for the above options you can click on OK. This will build an independent copy of your publication in whatever Directory you told it to. It will include all the files you asked to be distributed and all those specified in the Programs section of Installation Setup. It will combine all these files together and compress them and then create a setup.exe which runs just like the setup.exe which you and your user will have used to install many Windows programs and which you can set up via Installation Setup.

Distributing the Publication: When Publish is complete you will find that Illuminatus has created subdirectories for each disk of your publication. These are called disk1, disk2, disk3 etc and are located in whatever directory you told Illuminatus to publish into. To distribute your publication simply copy the files in each of these directories (not the directories themselves) to a formatted floppy first disk, second disk, third disk etc.

Note: Don't forget to try your publication before you distribute it.


Step-by-Step Text Input

To store information from users you need to create a text input frame and then report it to disk. You can also subsequently display this text in another frame.

Create A Text Input Frame

First draw the frame required in the normal way. When drawing the frame bear in mind what you will be asking your user to type in. The frame should be about 16 pixels deep for each line of text and wide enough to accommodate whatever the user is likely to want to type on one line if it is possible to predict that.

You can add a frame border if you wish.

You will also want to draw another frame alongside this one to put a label or instruction for the user (e.g: Type Name and Address Here Please:)

Click on the Text Input check box on the Summary section of Frame Options. Type the name of the file you want the information saved to in the box labelled File: (e.g: c:\order.txt). You can build up a file containing information from a number of frames by using the Append button (text is added in the order the frames were drawn on the page) or you can start a new file by clicking on the Overwrite option. You can also add a label for the piece of text by typing it into Prefix box. Thus enables you to add a database field identifier, a memo or a note.

The page will now look something like this

And when the publication is run the user will be able to type information into the box. Note that the frame shows an icon indicating text input and showing the file the text will be saved into.

Report the Input Text to Disk

Once you have set up your text input frames you need to record this information which is done by instructing a button to write the text to the disk file or files you set up in the File: box (in this example order.txt).

Draw a button and give it the caption Save Order. Then go to the Report tab and click on the Text Input radio button.

Displaying the Text in Another Frame

To display this information in a frame on another page, to display a user's name for example. You should set the frame you want to be a scrolling text box displaying a disk-based file of the same name. Ensure that the frame is very large so the whole of the text, and an amount of space around it, can be displayed without scrollbars.

First, create an input frame as above saving the text to a file called name.txt. You will want to set Overwrite on in this case to ensure that you only get a new file for each time a name is typed in.

Then go to the next page and create the frame you want to display the name in. Go to the Text dialog for this frame and type a character or two into the text box (the text is not important as it will be overwritten by the input text). Use the Save button to save the file to disk under the name we used for the text input (ie: name.txt). Click on the Scrolling checkbox to turn the frame into a scrolling text box. In doing so you also set Illuminatus to load a disk-based file at this point and when run will therefore load the file into which the user has typed their name.

However, please note that the scrolling text box function only looks for its text file in the publication's directory when compiled or published so when reporting or outputing text for use in this way you must ensure that no pathname is associated with the text so that the output function (e.g: Report Text) writes the text to the current directory which will be where the publication is.


Step-by-Step Timer

This shows how to use two buttons, one with a Delay option, to create a timer. In this instance the timer will apply to a popup frame.

Firstly draw a frame on page and type some text into it or load a picture, background colour or whatever.

Set it as a pop up frame by clicking the pop up frame checkbox. And give it an appropriate Frame Title.

Next draw a button somewhere else on your page and double click on it to go to Button Options.

Type an appropriate caption (e.g: PopUp) and then click on the Show Frame checkbox. Click on the arrow alongside the box next to this checkbox to drop down a list of the pop up frames available on the page and select the Frame Title for the frame you've just created.

Now create a second button approximately the same size and shape as the first and position it over the other one. You can make it exactly the same size and shape if you wish but this is best done after you have finished editing or it can be difficult to select between the two buttons. Thus whenever the user clicks on one button he/she will click on both.

To avoid the potential confusion and odd appearance of two visible buttons make the second button invisible by checking the Invisible option on the Button Summary dialog.

Set the second button to Hide the same frame as the first one showed by clicking on the Hide Frame checkbox and selecting the correct page title from the drop down list alongside.

Type the number of seconds or tenths of seconds you want the pop up frame to stay visible for in the Delay box and click the Delay checkbox.

Run Preview to try this out. The pop up frame should appear when you click on the button and the automatically disappear after the time interval you set. The Cabrio Tutorial sample provided with the program contains working examples of this.


Stop Moving Pictures

You can instruct a button to stop any animations, video, slideshows and MPEG movies which are currently playing by clicking the checkbox at the bottom of the dialog on.

Button Options: Summary

Moving Images


Summary Info

Allows you to record notes and details about your publication such as title, who created it, and any notes or keywords you want to add. You can also assign it a category. This is for quick reminders/reference for when you are looking at a publication you have forgotten or which was created by someone else.


SummaryPop
These options provide a quick way

to switch the other functions on and off


Technical Details

Distribution Disk Space

The distributable multimedia publication is optimised and compressed as much as possible allowing a viable MPB to fit on a single floppy disk. Exactly how much information will fit depends on the type of resources you use. Text, midi music and sixteen colour bitmaps will take up less room than WAV files and 256 or 16.7 million colour graphics. A 1.44Mb floppy will probably hold about 20 pages of average material though one user of version 2.1 has fitted 90 pages on a single floppy because the style of graphics helped the compression. Much smaller files can be achieved by publishing your publication in mono (select the Mono option on the Compile or Publish dialog) although this will reduce the attractiveness of graphics intended for use in colour. The overhead for the executable proportion of your publication work is little more than 280K but there is a small additional overhead for the program which will install your publication from disk.

Compile Times

Compile and Publish will take slightly longer when you Compile or Publish to a colour scheme different from the one you are working on. This occurs because Illuminatus has additional work to do reducing the colours in each page. OmniPalette can also increase compile time somewhat because of the extra work involved.

Temporary Files

Illuminatus creates temporary files when publishing and compiling. The size of these depends on the number of pages in your publication. Illuminatus will warn you when you are running low on disk space but we suggest you keep at least 10Mb free at all times. If a compile or publish operation fails it is probably the reason.

Multiple Publications

You can only use graphical buttons in sub-publications (publications launched by another Illuminatus publication). If those publications are in the same directory as the publication which launched them.

Replaying a 256-colour publication in 16 colours

If you or your user is trying to display a 256-colour publication in 16-colour VGA mode the publication will run quite slowly as Illuminatus optimises each page so that it looks as good as it can under 16colours. If you want to avoid this you can create a special 16 colour version by selecting this in the Output section of the Compile and Publish dialogs.

Technical Specifications of Illuminatus Publications.

Illuminatus publications can contain up to 500 pages. Operations can become quite slow in publications over 150 pages and memory, processor speed and free disk space become very important with large publications. Large publications can be created in series if required.

Slideshows are currently limited to 50 images except when using the All Files option which will display all the files in the chosen directory.

Pages are currently limited to 25 buttons and 25 frames. If you need more frames you can, where appropriate, add the static material and then export the page so the static material is part of the graphic for the background and the frames which originally contained it can be used for other things.


Technical Support

The following topics will help if you have technical problems with Illuminatus.

Frequently Asked Questions

Hints and Tips

Important Considerations

Technical Details

If you require further technical assistance with Illuminatus, call Digital Workshop Technical Support on 01295 273476 Alternatively you can fax (01295 254590) or post details of your problem to us.

If you are a member of Compuserve you can GO WORKSHOP (Section 16 of WINPAG) where you will find other users to help you as well as Digital Workshop staff. You can mail us directly on [74431,1160].

If you are a member of CiX you can join theworkshop where there is a topic for Illuminatus or you can mail theworkshop with you question.

Save Yourself a Phone Call

To help us to maintain our technical support service free of charge please try to solve your own problems before you call. Things you could try first are...

Read the relevant section in the appropriate manual and look for any related subject in the index.

Do the same with the online help

Read the Frequently Asked Questions sections of both the manual and the Help file.

Try to repeat your problem. Work through it again checking what you are doing and that you are not missing any steps out or moving on too quickly to notice an error message.

If you are trying to launch another program or an ILX Extension is the program in the location you have specified in the Launch Program: box. If you have not specified a directory make sure it is in the directory the publication is currently running from.

If possible try a similar thing in another Windows package. If you're having trouble printing try printing something from Paintbrush (for bitmap graphics) or Write (for text and/or metafile graphics). If you're having sound, video or animation problems try playing the file via Media Player.

Check that you are not running out of disk space (File Manager displays the free disk space in the status bar at the bottom) or system resources (choose Help|About in Program Manager to find out what your resources are). Try freeing some disk space by deleting unwanted files or restart Windows to refresh your system resources.

When You Call

If you do need to call we will be able to help you much more if you can be at your computer with Windows and Illuminatus running and that you have the following information to hand

The exact wording of any error message you received.

What version of our software you are running (you can find this on the About box viewed by choosing Help|About).

The version of Windows you are using.

The type of processor (386, 486, Pentium), the amount of RAM (memory) and disk space your computer has.

Graphics card type and the mode you are running in.

Make of  sound card you are using (if relevant).When you call or write to technical support, please have as much information as possible available including the make and type of your computer, the amount of memory installed and the size of hard disk.

If it is possible to have access to your computer when phoning it is usually helpful to have the program running on the system when you call.


Text

Captions for buttons, titles and short pieces of text can be typed directly into Illuminatus. Larger amounts of text can be imported from files on disk by using the Import button on Frame Options: Text. This is to allow you to create your Illuminatus text using your favourite word processor and then import it into the publication.

If your text doesn't fit conveniently in a frame then you can set the Scrolling option to put scrollbars on the frame (only visible in Preview or finished publications) so the user can scroll through the whole of the text file. This is important as large amounts of text spread across the whole page can be difficult to read.

Scrolling text boxes can now be used to display scores and information from the user. They only display scrollbars if required so single line text can be displayed without scrollbars. However, please note that the scrolling text box function only looks for its text file in the publication's directory when compiled or published so when reporting or outputing text for use in this way you must ensure that no pathname is associated with the text so that the output function (e.g: Report Text) writes the text to the current directory which will be where the publication is. Please also note that because of text spacing settings both in Illuminatus and some True Type font definitions the size of frame a single line needs before it does not require scrollbars is considerable.

If you want to keep a text file separate from your publication you can save it to disk using the Save button on the Text section of the Frame Options dialog.

Fonts

Text Formatting

Graphics

Sound

Moving Images


Text Formatting

Individual words and phrases can be highlighted by applying attributes to selected text using the buttons on the top right of the Text section of the Frame Options dialog. This inserts special formatting codes on either side of the text which Illuminatus interprets when creating the text.

e.g: "a piece of \bbold\b text" would give..."a piece of bold text"

You can apply more than one attribute to a piece of text.

You can edit and insert these codes manually which means they can be used in text created in a word processor and can be used in both scrolling text boxes and button captions.

Removing Attributes

You can remove the codes manually by selecting them and pressing the Delete key. Don't forget to remove the "\" and both of the pair of codes. You can also use the Remove Format button to remove all the codes from a particular piece of text.

Attribute Codes

\i	=italic

\b	=bold

\u	=underline

\c	=colour, followed by two numbers for each colour as follows

00	=default colour as chosen in the font selection box

01	=white

02	=light grey

03	=bright red

04	=bright yellow

05	=bright green

06	=bright cyan

07	=bright blue

08	=dark grey

09	=dark red

10	=dark yellow

11	=dark green

12	=dark cyan

13	=dark blue

14	=dark magenta

15	=light magenta

16	=black


Text Input Frame

This option on the Frame Options: Summary allows you to set your frame to accept text typed in by the user. No other contents are allowed in text input frames which will appear as blank white boxes. When the mouse cursor appears over them it changes to the familiar "i" bar to show that text can be typed in.

The frame can be any size you like but must obviously be big enough to comfortably accommodate what you are expecting the user to type in. The user can type in multiple lines of text if required.

You specify the file the text is to be stored in by typing the path and filename in the File box. You can tell Illuminatus to start a new file for this text by setting the Overwrite option or you can add the current text to any that exists already by checking the Append option. You can also type in a prefix for the text which will be recorded in the text file immediately before the text typed in by the user. This is useful for labeling the incoming information or tagging it with a database field name.

Step-by-step Text Input.


Timed Page

You make a page turn without requiring a button to be clicked by checking the Timed option on the Summary section of the Page Options dialog. This can be used to create an automatic rolling presentation or can be used to move a page in an interactive presentation on even if the user doesn't press a button.

Page Options: Summary


Titles and Filenames

To make Illuminatus easy to use it uses user-defined titles to refer to things rather than filenames. Whenever you select an animation, slideshow or video to go into a frame you give it a title by typing it into the box provided. This allows a much more descriptive name than the eight letters of a DOS filename and also allows you to use the same animation in more than one location and still know which one you are referring to when launching it.

When you want to add such an event to a button you can then choose the element by its title in the drop down list box provided.

Pages have titles too. These are shown in a box in the toolbar in Page View and can be edited there. They also display in Publication View as an aid to identification.

Publication Titles

Publications also have titles. A publication's title is the name which appears in the menu bar of the window of your publication and beneath the icon in Program Manager.

It is also used by the setup program. These are set up via the Installation Setup dialog. if you try to compile or publish your publication before you have set a title Illuminatus will prompt you for one as it is required before both Publish and Compile can proceed successfully. You will only need to set the title once although you can change it at any time if you wish to.

Publication Filenames

These are the names of the actual program element of your publication and should therefore be a standard DOS program filename such as myprog.exe or digibook.exe.


To Back

 select Move...to Back from the Edit menu

This will move a selected frame to the back to appear over behind any other frames. It will also bring a selected button to appear behind any other buttons.

All frames always appear behind buttons.

To Front


To Front

 select Move...to Front from the Edit menu

This will bring a selected frame to the front to appear over the top of any other frames. It will also bring a selected button to appear over the top of any other buttons.

To Back


Tools

This option offers you access to programs for editing text, graphics and sound without leaving Illuminatus.

The default settings are to use the programs which comes with Windows, namely Write for text, Paintshop Pro for graphics and ILMWaved for sound.

You can change this setting using the Setup Tools option on the Tools menu.

Related Topics

Picture Editor

Word Processor

Sound Editor

Setup Tools


Top

 select Align from the Edit menu in Page View

Selecting this option will align the top of all selected items with the top of the object highest up the page.

Left

Right

Bottom


Transparent

When displaying a bitmap graphic Illuminatus can ignore a particular colour in that image and allow whatever appears behind the image to show through. You can choose which colour this will be and usually you will want to specify the colour of the background of the image so only the object in the image is displayed as simulated here.

Wherever the transparency option is available the transparent colour will be displayed along with a Set Colour button which you can click on to bring up a standard Windows colour selection dialog to choose an alternative. The exception to this is on the slideshow dialog. Slideshows use the transparent colour setup on the Background tab and you will need to edit it there if you want a different one.

Note: For technical reasons you should only pick colours which are solid in 256 colour mode and not those represented by a series of different coloured dots (dithered).

Tip: When creating or editing graphics to be used transparently use an unusual colour and ensure you pick one which isn't used in the graphic. Bright red is used for transparency in most of the images which come with Illuminatus, magenta is another useful colour.

Problems: There are a number of things to check if your image does not display transparently...

Ensure that the colour you have set as transparent is exactly the same as the colour you want to be transparent in your image as the colours may be so similar as to fool the naked eye but in fact they are different. You can check this precisely by looking at the numerical values for Red, Green and Blue in the colour selection box and comparing them with those in your image when examined in a paint program.

Ensure that the area you want to be transparent is all one colour. It may be that there are variations in the background colour of an image (particularly photo-realistic images and where objects meet) which are too difficult to spot with the naked eye. You should replace the varying colour with a single one using something like the Flood Fill tool in Paintshop Pro with a Colour Tolerance setting high enough to even out all the variation in the background.

If you are running in greater than 256 colour mode and the transparency only fails when viewed in 256colours it is likely you have chosen a colour which is not solid in Windows' standard 256 colour mode. You will need to pick an alternative colour.


Undo

 select Undo from the Edit menu in Page View	Ctrl+Z

This allows you to undo your last change or changes. Up to 20 actions can be reversed.

Redo


Welcome Screen

See Also Quick Start

The Welcome Screen in Illuminatus allows you to go straight to where you want to start work. You can click on the buttons provided to choose where you start.

 will open a File Open dialog to let you open an existing publication or to load a sample or tutorial file.

 will open a New and entirely blank publication.

 will open a skeleton publication known as a Publication Template.

 (at the bottom of the dialog) will open the last file you used which is given in the box alongside.

If you change your mind about running Illuminatus at this time simply press the Cancel button and the program will close again.


What Can Illuminatus Do for Me?

At its simplest Illuminatus lets you put together interactive multimedia publications using the screen of a computer as the pages of an electronic book in a simple manner. It therefore allows ordinary people to create electronic versions of almost anything they can do on paper with greater pizzazz and with the advantage of being able to add sound and moving pictures too

Each page can contain a mixture of text, pictures, animations, video and sounds or music. These multimedia elements can be part of the page when it is first turned or can be delayed to appear later or can appear in response to the reader activating a button by clicking on it with the mouse or even simply by moving the mouse cursor over it.

When you have finished creating your publication you make a fully-independent program simply by "compiling" it this creates a ready-to-run copy for you to run outside the Illuminatus editor on your own computer, or "publishing" it  which creates an installable version of the publication and chops it up into chunks the right size for distributing on disk.

The process is much like creating a booklet with a desktop publishing package except the final result is an interactive multimedia document on disk or CD-Rom rather than printed on paper, hence multimedia publishing.

Illuminatus - mirabile dictu, mirabile visu

Learning About Illuminatus

What is Multimedia Publishing


What Colour Mode Should I Choose?

Mono

Black & white. Use this mode for creating very small distributable files. Some stylish effects can still be produced in black and white.

16 colours

The "Windows" colours which are the solid colours available in Paintbrush. This mode offers simple colour with relatively small files and so is useful for creating boldly coloured but small publications, e.g: for children’s programs which need to be distributed on disk.

Not recommended for photo quality material but if you absolutely have to display photographs in 16colours use a good paint package to reduce them to 16colours using a dithering method called Error Diffusion.

Not suitable for animations and not really recommended for video.

256 colours

This mode provides the smallest/quickest publications which can contain reasonable quality photographic material, video and animation. The snag is that any one picture, video or animation can take up all the 256colours available to look its best so if another appears on the same page it has to use the colours in the first picture which can make it look very poor. This is called palette clash and is dealt with in further detail later on.

64k and 16.7million colours

These colour modes offer even greater photorealism than 256colours without palette clashing. The cost is that publishing in these colour modes will produce extremely large files. This is only recommended for publications which will be distributed on CD-Rom, where quality is paramount and/or where palette clashes are too awkward to resolve


What is Multimedia Publishing?

Multimedia is one of the most exciting forms of communication available to us today but until now creating multimedia communications was a difficult and demanding job. Now Illuminatus introduces multimedia publishing which extends the concept of desktop publishing into the audio-visual, interactive realm of multimedia. With Illuminatus interactive multimedia programs can be created as easily as a DTP document and published in digital form for distribution on floppy disk, CD Rom or across the Internet.

Multimedia is already a favourite tool for the business presentation professional. Illuminatus offers the ability to quickly and easily add multimedia pizzazz to standard business presentation and promotional items but also allows you to extend presentation and promotion into new modes by easily adding interactivity and distribution of the finished publication.

Illuminatus is so simple to use that you don't need to be an expert to use it. Thus you can be an expert in something else and yet develop an interactive multimedia application.  It provides an ideal opportunity for enthusiasts and specialists to pass on their knowledge in this most exciting and effective way. It is also particularly useful where confidentiality is an issue and where the involvement of as few additional parties as possible is required.

Furthermore, you can also tailor your project to your own needs, capacities and budget so interactive multimedia comes into the reach of small businesses and  even individuals.

Multimedia Publishing offers "books" which can include sounds, and moving images as well as words and pictures, and which can be interactive. That is, they do not have to read page by page but allow the reader to choose the course of their study.

Multimedia publishing also offers the creative person an opportunity for creativity beyond what was previously available. A single creative artist can command words, pictures, music, sound and filmic images into whatever combination he or she desires.

As implemented by Illuminatus multimedia publishing works in much the same way as DTP except that the documents it publishes are published in computer form rather than on paper. Illuminatus makes multimedia publishing easy and will publish onto floppy disks so that it makes it possible to produce multimedia versions of even simple documents such as memos and greeting cards.

Multimedia publishing is extraordinary communication for ordinary people. Illuminatus is multimedia publishing at its easiest.

Illuminatus - mirable dictu, mirable visu


Window Menu Option

Cascade

Arranges all the windows you currently have open neatly into a stepped array with the title bars showing.

Tile

Arranges all the window you currently have open neatly in a tiled arrangement.

Arrange Icons

Neatly arranges and spaces the icons of minimised publications at the bottom of the main window.

Close All

Closes all the windows you currently have open, including minimised ones, asking you if you want to save those which have changed


Word Processor

This option allows you to launch your favourite text editor or word processor program to create or edit text without leaving Illuminatus. When you have finished editing or creating the text save it to disk ready for use in Illuminatus.

You must save it as DOS or ASCII text to use it in the current version of Illuminatus.

If you edit a file you are already using in Illuminatus the copy in your publication will be automatically updated

Related Topics

Text

Setup Tools


Working with More Than One Object

You can select more than one object at a time by pressing the Shift key at the same time as clicking on the object. The selection handles will appear around each one. You can select a both buttons and frames or a mixture.

Having selected multiple objects you can move them by keeping Shift pressed down and dragging one of the objects to the new location.

You can delete all the selected objects by pressing the Delete key or toolbar button just as you would with single objects.

You can resize multiple objects by resizing one of the objects in a multiple selection. The others will be resized similarly.


Zoom 100%

 select Zoom 100% from the Page menu

Shows your current page at the size it will actually display. This gives you the best preview of your page without using Preview but unless you are running Illuminatus in a resolution higher than 640x480 you will not be able to see the whole page at once.

Related Topics

Zoom 50%

Zoom To Fit

Next Page

Previous Page

First Page

Last Page

Preview


Zoom 50%

 select Zoom 50% from the Page menu

Shows your current page at half the size it will display. This view is often a good compromise for users running Illuminatus in 640x480 allowing you to see the whole page in reasonable detail.

Related Topics

Zoom 100%

Zoom To Fit

Next Page

Previous Page

First Page

Last Page

Preview


Zoom to Fit

 select Zoom to Fit from the Page menu

Scales the view of the current page so that the whole page fits into the current window. When you resize the window the page will be scaled to fit the new size. If you zoom to fit when the window is quite small you may lose some details of your page and it may be difficult to select the elements you want to edit. We recommend you use Zoom to Fit with the largest possible window - maximise both Illuminatus and your publication window.

Related Topics

Zoom 50%

Zoom 100%

Next Page

Previous Page

First Page

Last Page

Preview


Custom Cursors

You do not need only use the default Windows cursors in your publication but can instead use ones  related to the subject of your publication.

There are three states you can set cursors for

Normal

This is the cursor which will simply indicate the position of the mouse pointer when the others are not used.

Busy

This is used when the system is doing something and is usually the familiar egg timer cursor.

Select

This cursor is used when there is something to be clicked on.

You set up custom cursors via the Publication Options: Cursors dialog.

Ordinarily under Windows both Select and Normal are the same arrow shape but they are separated here to allow you to have special cursors to signify when there is a hotspot or hidden button on the page so users do not miss buttons which do not look like buttons.

A range of both unusual and basic cursors are provided with the program.