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Linking text boxes not working on iBooks Author

Can not get the first page of the chapter to produce the links need to flow to the next page. Anyone having success with this? Can not figure out what I missed...

Posted on Jan 19, 2012 9:49 PM

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16 replies

Jan 20, 2012 1:01 PM in response to IamBacktoMac

Here are the steps:


First Make sure to open Inspector and have layout ready.


Create a text box, then fill it with some text. (I usually use the latin gibberish)

Select the text so that its outline turns a bluish color.

Select Format > Advanced from the top menu and make sure 'Define as Placeholder Text' has a check mark.

If it doesn't then click 'Enable Placeholder Text Authoring' and try again

Now go to the inspector and make sure 'Editable on pages using this layout' has a check mark on its check button.

Finally select or create a tag to associate with the text and press enter.


Try making a linked text box at this point, there should be a small bluish arrow on the right hand corner of the page.

Jan 21, 2012 12:16 AM in response to David Bourne

I finally got it !!


Alysone forgot to say that after you have set the text box to 'Editable on pages using this layout' in the Layout tab of the Inspector, you also have to select 'body' in the Tag drop down menu. After that you get the small blue connector arrows.

Now you can, in the menu, select "Add linked text box" or if you select on box in the flow "Insert Linked Text box"


When you then have a textbox on your page, with the blue arrows, you can drag out a link to make a new linked box. If the first one is full of text the new linked box will fill with that overflow.


It wasn't obvious but that is how it works 🙂



Jan

Jan 21, 2012 4:20 AM in response to Jan Suhr

I found a thing that I don't like with linking text boxes.


You seem to have to create the linked boxes on the template pages. The thing that is not good is that when you click the 'Editable on pages using this layout' checkbox you can no longer edit the fill and stroke on the textbox. Not on the template page and not on the pages. So you end up doing another shape under the textbox that have the fill and stroke settings you would have liked to apply to the textboxes themselves.


Can't understand why Apple made this limitation to the textboxes.


Jan

Jan 21, 2012 7:54 AM in response to Jan Suhr

OK... ;-)


I did something and was able to see a larger Layout section with the option, after choosing New Inspector. I'm not sure what I did to get that though. Not repeatable yet.


I was trying to repeat the process and got lost. I then discovered each page has outlines and if you paste into this space the text flows from page to page. Maybe I don't need textboxes unless to highlight sections of extra material... maybe I'll leave linked textboxes for now. If I could only get Dashcode to work on more than one machine but that's another link.

Jan 24, 2012 1:11 PM in response to nickagneta

You got it! I think Apple screwed up on the methodology of text box linking and forcing it to the LAYOUT only. I can see why they decided to do it this way...to keep the process simpler as story/text being imported/flowed into a layout auto-magically generates as many pages as it needs until story/text runs out.


Maybe this will be an improvement down the line. Only at version 1.0. Can't wait to see what version 2.0 brings. 😉

Jan 30, 2012 12:48 PM in response to David Bourne

Rebuilding the iPhoto database fixed the Dashcode problem... described by others elsewhere.


I've had another look at this linking problem. What I wanted to do was add chapter objectives beyond the bottom left of the first first page of the Chapter template. I don't think you can flow text from one textbox to another. Also, In the inspector you can only use each tag once. The text linking may only work with the 'body' tag which is already taken by the second page of Chapter template. This is all with the first, Basic Template.


I was able to achieve essentially what I wanted by stretching the text box, tagged objectives, across two pages, set it as two columns with a gutter. I can fiddle with the title box (drag it across two pages), the objectives textbox (aligning text to the top or bottom of the box), change the font sizes, or in extreme remove some objectives as needed ;-)

Apr 24, 2012 9:21 AM in response to Jan Suhr

A question: I've create two linked text boxes using the "body" tag. Now I want to create in the same page two new linked text boxes. I've tried to use the body tag but iBooks Author said me: "You already used the tag body in this layout" (the message was in italian because I'm italian so probably my traslation isn't correct ⚠). So then I've tried to use some new tags but it didn't work. Well, how can I create two new linked text boxes? 😕

Linking text boxes not working on iBooks Author

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