·
Start by bringing all your slide files (preferably in .JPG format) into neat subdirectories. You can divide different sections into separate subdirectories (in fact, this is the recommended approach) and place all these subdirectories into a single directory called Resources, for example. If you have buttons with rollover states, provide those rollovers in the same directories, with suitable filenames (such as menu_rollovers.jpg)
Put the Luxurious software at the top-level of your directory structure. This will be the root of your new CD-ROM. It will only remain there whilst you are developing.
Launch the Luxurious software. At this stage, you can choose whether you want to create a new presentation, or edit an existing one.
In Luxurious, a presentation is a set of slides that belong together. Whilst it would be possible to put all your slides for your entire CD into a single presentation, it would be harder to maintain and may result in slower performance. Furthermore, a single presentation can only reference one particular directory containing images, which is why you should divide your slides into sensible subdirectories.
You will start off by making the main presentation. Give it a suitable name. You can choose a file name for the presentation, although the main presentation is always called begin.ini
Click the ... button and select which directory you will be using for your slide images, then press the Create button.
You will see the main window with the first image shown, and a popup Slides palette showing all the files that were in the selected directory. By default, the first file is set to be the starting slide, although this may not be what you wanted.
In the Slides palette, click the slide you want to be the starting slide. Choose Set starting slide from the Slide menu. The starting slide will now have changed to the correct image.
From now onwards, when this presentation loads, this will be the first slide that will be shown. Therefore, it is logical that you would want your menu slide to be the starting slide.
Now we will start to make hotspots, which control how your users will navigate around the presentations you build.
Drag a rectangle around the region you wish to define as a hotspot. You will set up many hotspots, each one with it's own target. If someone clicks within this region you are dragging, some sort of action will be performed.
When you finish dragging a rectangle, the hotspot inspector is shown.
The inspector shows you all relevant information about the hotspot. It will show you the exact Click region of your hotspot - you may change the coordinates by hand if you want, although this is rarely necessary.
First, set the Target for that hotspot. The Target defines what will happen when a user clicks on the hotspot.
If you provided a rollover image for this slide, select it in the Update image menu. The Update region is the area of the slide that will be redrawn using bitmap data from the rollover image when the mouse is within the hotspot. Usually this is the same area as the actual hotspot (which is how it is, by default) although you can also change this region by hand.
The + button expands the Update region by 5 pixels. This may be useful if your rollover image uses a drop-shadow that extends outside of the actual Click region. The Full-screen and Hotspot buttons adjust the Update region as expected.
Click Okay when you're happy with the hotspot you've just created.
You will now see your new hotspot listed underneath the current slide in the Slides palette. As you create hotspots and move around your presentation, the Slides palette becomes useful as it highlights which slide you are currently viewing, as well as which hotspot you are currently over.
If your mouse is within a hotspot, you can copy the hotspot to the clipboard using Cmd-C (Ctrl-C on Windows). Pasting a hotspot creates an exact replica of the copied hotspot in whatever slide you are editing. This is very useful when you want to duplicate the functionality of buttons repeatedly across multiple slides.
To go back and modify an existing hotspot, Ctrl-click on the hotspot.
Hotspots can have targets that do a range of things, not just go to another slide. The command:nothing and command:quit targets are obvious. The url: target will cause a web browser to open to the requested URL when the hotspot is clicked. Press the ... button to modify the URL data.
Similarly, the file: target opens a file on disk. If you include .PDFs in your Resources directory, you can specify the relative path to them, and the user's PDF reader will launch and open the file when the hotspot is clicked. You can even specify directory paths using the file: target - this will cause the Finder (Explorer on Windows) to open the folder for browsing.
If you have more than one presentation available, you can get a hotspot to chain to another one. This causes the current presentation to close and a new presentation to open. Using the chain: target, it is possible to build a large number of presentations whilst keeping the resource subdirectories tidy, and keeping each presentation small and easy to maintain.
Note that when you click on a chain: hotspot, the current presentation is closed. If you have made changes then you need to save the presentation before you chain to a new one.
Now that you've created a presentation, you can start the process again and use a new subdirectory with different images. Giving it a different file name (notes.ini instead of begin.ini, for example) will mean that Luxurious will be able to offer the new presentation in the list of chain: targets.
You can easily go back and edit an existing presentation by choosing the other tab in the Welcome dialog when you launch Luxurious.
When you've done creating all your presentations, setting up your hotspots with their targets and rollovers, and have chained your presentations together, you can replace the Luxurious software with the Begin software.
When you've finished, you will have one or more Begin softwares (pick the right one for your platform), with one or more .ini files (one for each presentation), and hopefully one Resources folder containing all your .JPG slides.
The .ini files can be transported between platforms. They are compatible with both the Macintosh and Windows versions of the Begin software.