Exporting HTML from Tinderbox 7: Oakley example

[PaulWalters]

Howard Oakley, proprietor of the Eclectic Light Company blog, has been mentioned here a few times. He has published a new example for

Exporting HTML from Tinderbox 7: Using CSS for a Help Book

A good solid example of advanced HTML and CSS techniques with Tinderbox 7 prototypes, templates, and document organization. The example files are also available for download and experimentation / playing along on your own.

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For more of Howard’s work see these recent posts

Oakley tutorial on Composites

Thanks to the tip from Mark Bernstein – this tutorial on Composites from Howard Oakley (leading expert on Storyspace and Tinderbox) is well worth the time (Mr. Oakley also manages to insert an easter egg into tutorial – a neologism that, when searched in Google, returns exactly one Google hit. A rare thing.)

Howard Oakley's Storyspace v3 tutorials

Howard Oakley has written an excellent series of articles on his blog exploring Storyspace v3. Most of the articles are pertinent - or will be familiar to - a Tinderbox user as well. Curated index page of Storyspace articles on his blog: Storyspace 3: index to articles v2 – The Eclectic Light Company Wordpress’ auto-listing by tag ‘storyspace’: Storyspace – The Eclectic Light Company - this makes it easier to browse a listing with a bit of extra per-article info & image.

[mwra (Mark Anderson)]

I’d commend this too. A couple of relevant side points that came up in discussion with the author during preps for the above:

• If new to HTML export, don’t overlook that ^value()^ doesn’t process text for HTML entities, nor do String-type attributes hold styled date. So if, for example, you’ve footer text stored in $Footer than needs a bolded section, you’ll need to put the <b></b> tags into the footer text and then ^value($Footer)^ will have the desired text.

• Image export. If you want more than one image per note, you’ll need to embed images in $Text and export. However, the resulting tag for an image in ‘Article X’ will be <img src="ArticleX.jpg" art="".. If you need to have alt text (e.g. perhaps for legal accessibility requirements) or height/width data, then you’ll need to post-edit the exported HTML. There are alternate approaches to work around this but these are best discussed in a new (export) thread if anyone wants to know more.

• If you want to make all the project output self-contained, e.g. local CSS and JavaScript files, then Tinderbox export can handle that. A good example is to take a look at the source TBX for aTbRef7 which uses just such an approach (except for images, for reasons alluded to in the point above).