ePublisher for Newbies - Starting from Scratch

Quick article on how to get up and running with ePublisher Designer.

by Lauren Lever
October 15, 2013
Solutions

Our documentation provides a lot of good information for those of you who have been working with ePublisher and want to get specific information about a topic, but admittedly it can be a bit overwhelming, so I thought I would try to distill this information for a quick-start guide in using ePublisher. By no means is this a comprehensive guide, for that we offer training.

Lesson 1 - Creating and Modifying a Designer Project.

  1. Go to File -> New. This will bring up the following window:

    Image of New Project Wizard

  2. You can chose whatever name you want for the Project and the Target (covered more in depth by training). This window also lets you choose what kind of Format you want to use, for the purposes of this demonstration, we are going to use WebWorks Reverb (which, by the way is the output that our documentation uses). Click Next

  3. Click Add put source files for this document. For the purposes of this demonstration, we are going to use FrameMaker:

    Image of New Project Wizard

  4. In the next window, we are going to navigate to the following directory:

    C:\Users\[yourusername]\Documents\ePublisher Express Projects\Source\Adobe Framemaker

    Selecting a Framemaker book

  5. We are going to add the book file located in this folder. Click the Open button to add this file, and then you are going to click the Finish button on the next screen.

    New Project file selection screen

  6. Now you will see something like this in the Document Manager:

    Image of Document Manager with new files selected

  7. With the first document selected, as you see in the above image, Go to Project -> Display Preview and you will select the "Heading_1" style by clicking "About the Sample Exploring ePublisher Source Documents (FrameMaker)" paragraph style. Again more in depth coverage of this is done in the ePublisher 101 training that we offer:

    Brief document on selecting a heading

  8. We are going to change the color of this heading by going to Text -> Color in the Style Designer pictured below Notice that now the Text heading is bolded, this indicates that we have made a change to something in the Style Designer:

    Image of the Style Designer

  9. You can actually see the changes by clicking the green Refresh Preview button on the top corner:

    Image of the New style of heading 1

  10. For the purposes of this small demonstration, we are going to generate with just heading 1's changed, Go to the 3 blue gears in the toolbar to do a generation:

    Image of the toolbar

  11. Once you click this, you will see logs that will indicate that you are generating and then you may get a message like this, go ahead and click Yes, and you can also select this message not to come up again as pictured below

    Image of the view output button

  12. Once you click yes you should be able to view the output and it will look like this when you click the right navigation button on the top.

    Image of the output

  13. Click File -> Save to save your project for the next lesson So, this was a very basic example of output that is possible from our sample source files. Right now we have navigation in our Reverb output, but we do not have a table of contents, breadcrumbs or any other bells and whistles that Reverb offers. I hope this gives you a good starting point.


Further Reading