When adding text to your page in iBooks Author^R, you have many styling options. However, if you have more text than can fit on the page, you need a way for the reader to view all the text. One way to do this is to use iBooks Author's Sidebar Scrollbar widget. We are all familiar with how a scrollbar works. Another option is to build a mini slide show in Keynote^R and export it as an HTML widget for iBooks Author.

In this tutorial, we will build a two-slide Keynote widget for iBooks Author. Each slide will contain half of the text for the page in our book and an interactive arrow icon to move between slides. As you would expect, the first slide will have an arrow that, when clicked, will display the second slide. The second slide's arrow will display the first slide again.

After a little experimenting, I found that a 550 x 400 pixel slide will cover half of the page of an iBA landscape layout. However, depending on your artwork, your page may need a different size slide.

Open Keynote and let's get started.

1. Let's start with a simple Theme. Choose the White template from the Theme Chooser.
   
   
2. We don't want to use the default text boxes on the slide. So, select them both and delete.
   
   
3. We also need to change the size of the slides to fit inside our iBA book's page. Click the Document tab in the right pane to open the Document section. Set the Slide Size option to Custom Slide Size, set the Width to 550 and Height to 400 in the pop up window and click OK.
   
   Now we can load our custom background graphic on to the slide. We need our Keynote widget to blend in to the page in our book. One way to do that is to set the background for the widget to match the background color of the page. Another would be to add a background image that matches the background image on the page.
   
   
4. Click the Format icon from the Toolbar to open the Slide Layout pane on the right, set the Background options to Image Fill and Scale to Fill.
   
   
5. Click the Choose button to open the Finder and choose your background image.
   
   
6. We will need two slides. So right-click the slide thumbnail in the Slide Navigator and choose Copy. From the top menu, choose Edit - Paste. You should now have two slides in the Slide Navigator pane.
   
   

Continue

Apple, Motion, iBooks Author, GarageBand, TextEdit, Pages, iMovie and Mac are trademarks of Apple Inc., registered in the U.S. and other countries. BellaOnline is an independent publication and has not been authorized, sponsored, or otherwise approved by Apple Inc. Screenshots used by permission.