To make the creation of SMIL presentations easier, Fluition has Templates with instruction windows that walk you through a presentation. Fluition also allows you to create your own Templates with customizable instruction windows in order to pass these templates along to another user or for later reference. A presentation can be created from a template by selecting New From Template from the File menu option. Creating a presentation from a template will open the Template Instructions window. This window will display the steps involved with modifying the template to create a new presentation.
Template instructions are actually part of the Fluition SMIL presentation code and can be customized. The template instruction information is contained within comment tags and are placed after the </smil> tag at the end of the presentation. Fluition templates are saved as .SMT files. If a template is created and saved as an .SMT file in the Templates folder in the Fluition folder installed on your computer, you will see a visual representation of your template when you choose the New From Template option under the File menu.
Template instructions use the following format:
| Start of instructions |
<!-- SMT Steps: |
| Step Tag |
<step number="stepnumber" action="action"> |
| Step Text |
Step Instructions |
| End Step Tag |
</step> |
| End of instructions |
SMT steps end--> |
Example:
<!-- SMT Steps:
<step number="2"> CHANGING THE BACKGROUND IMAGE <br>The first step is to… </step>
SMT steps end-->
To see more examples of how a Fluition template has been assembled, view the code at the bottom of one of the templates that are included with Fluition.
The Start line is used by Fluition to identify that there are instructions contained within the template and also opens the comment tags to conceal the instructions from a player program.
The Step Tag contains the number of the step as well as any actions that may occur within Fluition while the steps are being displayed. Actions can be one of the following:
preview - Previews the presentation
buildsmil - Builds the presentation and displays the code window
showoptions - Opens the Fluition Options Window
showlayout - Opens the Fluition Layout Window
showAnchor - Opens the Fluition Anchors Window
showtext - Opens the TextStream Builder Window
showseries - Opens the Series Producer window
When an instruction step is displayed, the instructions window also contains an Action Button. When you click on the Action button, the action is executed according to the Action contained within the Step tag. If there is no Action specified, the Action button is disabled.
The Step Text is the text that will be displayed in the template instructions window. This text can be information and uses <br> tags for line breaks.
The End Step Tag tells Fluition to look for the next step.
The End of Instructions Tag tells Fluition that the instructions are complete and also closes the comment tag.
The Template format and instructions were designed to make the creation and customization of templates easy and flexible and allow for the creation of new customized templates that can be passed along to other users you may be working with.