The Step Card Widget, like ToolBook’s Index Card widget, allows you to present "cards" of text one card at a time so that the user can step forwards or backwards through the text without the need for a scroll bar.
As well as avoiding large unfriendly scrolling fields, both the Index Card and Step Card allow you to synchronise the presentation of information to the text that the user is currently reading. They do this without the need for viewers and dozens of extra pages in your book. However, the Step Card widget also adds to the functionality of the Index Card idea to overcome a couple of serious problems with the Index Card widget.
Unfortunately, the normal ToolBook Index Card does not support text formatting such as italic, bold, multiple fonts, bullets or images. Given this it is not surprising that it is not WYSIWYG when you are in authoring mode either which makes it hard to fit your text to the available space.
The Step Card widget uses RTF (Rich Text Format) text and so can contain formatted text and images just like any other text field in ToolBook. It also supports WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) editing in author mode just like a normal text field.
The Step Card widget also makes it easy to synchronise the displaying of information elsewhere on the screen or, for that matter, over the top of the widget itself.
The following zip file contains a single book, called stepcard.tbk. This book is a self-contained demonstration and tutorial built around the Step Card widget itself. The final page of the book contains a master copy of the widget along with instructions on how to add this to the ToolBook Catalog.
stepcard.zip (74K) (ToolBook 8.5)
