Making Things Happen

You can make your publication active and interactive by adding actions to objects to make things happen. This could be to make objects appear or disappear or to animate them. Most obviously actions are used to move from page to page, or to move from a menu to the specific page. Actions can also be used to control sound and video and to track answers and keep score.

The first step in making things happen in your publication is to add the "trigger". This is the event which will make your action start. You can select all the basic triggers such as a Left Mouse Click or a Keypress but you can also trigger actions On Show which means they will happen automatically when an object appears on your page.

Once you have chosen the trigger you can choose an action ro a series of actions which will occur when that event is triggered. There are several categories of actions available such as Audio/Video, Scoring, Animation and each contains a range of relevant actions including Play Video, Stop Sound, Launch Browser, Show, Hide, Go to page etc. For a full list of triggers and actions see the List of Actions page.

You can set up a range of actions and they can be designed to run one after another or you can put them into a Simultaneous Action group to make them all happen at once. There is also a Delay action to pause activity for however long you want to set.

Timelines

For complicated combinations of actions or where you want to ensure you synchronise a range of actions and events you can use a timeline where individual actions can be positioned visually in respect of the publication time and each other.

Action Settings

Once you have chosen the action you simply chose a series of settings from the relevant dialog and then apply. More complex actions (often called functions) are also available using the Programming tab where you can set up simple programming-type constructs such as loops or conditional actions (for example "if...then" actions or "select...case" actions. In fact you still choose the options from a series of controls so no programming knowledge is really needed.

OpusScript

If you do need even more control and functionality then for Pro users there is even greater versatility. Opus Pro, Headstart Pro and Presenter Pro also provide a fully-featured scripting language and connectivity to external DLLs for all the development power you need for a whole range of applications.