Q: Navigation in iBooks
I have recently completed an illustrated biography of 152 pages in iBooks Author. Every page contains images and text and the text in each page refers to the images and must not stray onto neighbouring pages. I chose the Blank Portrait Template which provides a Chapter, a Section, and a Default Page. I did not require a Section so I deleted it leaving only the Chapter. I added an image and several lines of text to the Chapter page to act as the book Title.
I then inserted a Default Page by ctrl/click on the Chapter and I could see that it contained a linked text box. I found by experiment that this limits my access to the page. For example, images become anchored to the edge of the text box and can not be repositioned or rescaled and lines of text are moved onto the new page from other pages. I decided to deleted the linked text box to give myself complete control of the placement of images and text, and to prevent text flowing from one page to another. I continued adding pages without linked text boxes one by one.
Version 2.4.1 of iBooks Author has a new feature to insert Hyperlinks from any highlighted word in the text to navigate from the current page either to a nominated page number within the book, or to an external webpage. The feature is easy to use and I created an Index page placed immediately after the Title page to allow navigation to all parts of the book. I used the name Index to avoid confusion with the Table of Contents provided by iBooks.
Despite 40 years of professional IT experience and another 15 years doing my own thing with OSX, I have been unable to find a way of configuring Table of Contents to do what I want.
Navigation by Hyperlink works perfectly on the OSX version of iBooks on my iMac, but the IOS version for the iPad fails to distinguish between finger taps on the screen to execute a Hyperlink and taps to access the command bar or to turn the page forwards or backwards.
I respectfully suggest that finger taps should be reserved exclusively for Hyperlinks and that other actions should use single finger swipe gestures - upwards for command bar access and sideways for page turning.
I have alleviated the problem in my book by increasing the size of the Hyperlink words but that looks clunky and the link activation remains intermittent which would be puzzling for book readers. Another problem is that the Back to page facility in iBooks does not work on pages without a linked text box. I have included a message on my Index page to warn readers to ignore the Back to page link, and to use my Hyperlinks instead. That also looks too clunky for my liking.
I am reluctant to publish the book on the iBookstore in this condition and I am hoping that the iBooks developers will be able to deal with these issues in a future release.
Any comments would be welcome
Jeff
iMac, OS X El Capitan (10.11.5)
Posted on Aug 7, 2016 10:00 AM
Jeff Reeves wrote:
I am hoping that the iBooks developers will be able to deal with these issues in a future release.
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if you have not done so already.
Posted on Aug 7, 2016 12:40 PM