Gallery Plugin and Links, revisited

[Kaoru]

Hi,

this has been discussed before and florian has made his point regarding this feature, but I think with the release of Version 2, I would like to bring this topic up again and give and get some input, please bear with me.

Currently, you can mark each page with area elements and make them clickable, but this won´t work in gallery mode.
Florian had some valid points why this shouldn´t be available in gallery mode, but there are valid points as well why it doesn´t work well in pageflip mode either:

- In PageFlip mode, only part of the surface of the paper is available, the edges are hidden by the page turn area, so its very problematic to mark areas that are near the edge especially when half of the marked area is not clickable due to the page turn area.
In the latest releases you can tackle this problem by adjusting the page turn area to free up space, but in my eyes, the useability suffers when the page turn area gets too small.

- To reduce bandwidth, I think its best to scale down the pages in pageflip mode to a size where the visitor can get an idea of what is written on each page, read headlines etc and use the gallery mode so he can zoom in and read the pages in a crisp resolution if he finds something that interests him.
The problem is, some of the marked areas may only become interesting to the visitor when he can read them clearly in gallery mode, but while zoomed in, he can´t click on the area.

- When an area is marked, the user can´t click on the area to open the page in gallery mode. If many areas are marked, its really hard to find a spot to click and activate gallery mode.

Lets take a short look at florians arguments against the gallery mode:

He said it wouldn´t be intuitive to make the page clickable since you use the mouse to drag the zoomed page around when it doesn´t fit the screen.
In the latest releases, the page automatically moves to where you point the cursor, without clicking, so I think now it should be possible to make the page clickable without confusing the visitor.

The other argument was, if the user clicks an external link, the full screen mode will colapse. I haven´t really tried this out yet so I can´t say if its such a show stopper.

Finally, I read about this new zoom feature that is supposed to be implemented, would it maybe address all the problems I mentioned and make the gallery mode obsolete?

If not, I´m looking into implementing my own version of the gallery plugin. I have it going so far that I can draw rectangles on the paper surface in gallery mode, what I couldn´t figure out yet, is how to access the megazine config and read the area elements from the xml file. Any pointers regarding that?

I know florian mentioned a workaround, creating swfs that handle the links themselves but thats not really practical when you create ePapers on the fly and I wouldn´t know how to automate the creatinon of such an swf.

Thanks for reading through my ramblings

[Florian Nücke]

Hi,

Finally, I read about this new zoom feature that is supposed to be implemented, would it maybe address all the problems I mentioned and make the gallery mode obsolete?

I'm pretty sure you refer to the overall zoom, which is implemented already (just set book@zoomminscale != book@zoommaxscale). And this zoom is pretty much the reason why I'm not planning to invest any time into modding the gallery plugin to actually show higher resolution variants of actual pages (instead of images) -- it's intended to be just a normal image gallery. Thing is, you can have multiple images on one page, which are in the same gallery; so adding special handling to differentiate between normal gallery functionality and "page zoom" could get quite messy.

I don't know when I'll find the time to do it, but here's another approach that's been floating around in my head for some time now: I'd like to add an event to the engine that is dispatched whenever the zoom level changes (i.e. the user zooms in or out on the entire book). Based on that it would be possible to add a new... let's call it "filter" for attributes, similar to how languages work currently. I'm thinking of something like this:

Code: (xml)

<book zoomminscale="0.5" zoommaxscale="2">
    <chapter>
        <page>
            <img>
                <src scale="0.5">data/small.jpg</src>
                <src scale="1">data/normal.jpg</src>
                <src scale="1.5">data/large.jpg</src>
            </img>
        </page>
    </chapter>
</book>

Then, depending on the current zoom level, the respective image would be loaded / displayed.

But as I said, no idea when I'll find the time for that, there are some other priorities I'll have to take care of, first.

You are, however, invited to build your own, more powerful, gallery plugin

[KuriousKook]

Can the latest version be use something similar your code snippet here?

Code: (xml)

<book zoomminscale="0.5" zoommaxscale="2">
    <chapter>
        <page>
            <img>
                <src scale="0.5">data/small.jpg</src>
                <src scale="1">data/normal.jpg</src>
                <src scale="1.5">data/large.jpg</src>
            </img>
        </page>
    </chapter>
</book>

Is this something that is being worked on? Along this line will the page load all three .jpgs when it loads?

[Hans Nücke]

Absolutely, so Florian in the meanwhile found the time to implement it ;-)
But it should look like this:

Code: [Select]

  <spreadpage buffer_animate="true" >   
     <img position="center middle" width="1280" height="853" hires="data/2009/events/soelden/img/f028.jpg" gallery="bmw09" title="">
       <src lang="de" >data/2009/events/soelden/img/s028.jpg</src>
       <src scale="0.6" lang="de">data/2009/events/soelden/img/m028.jpg</src>
       <src scale="1.0" lang="de">data/2009/events/soelden/img/mf028.jpg</src>
       <src scale="2.0" lang="de">data/2009/events/soelden/img/f028.jpg</src>
       <src lang="en" >data/2009/events/soelden/img/s028.jpg</src>
       <src scale="0.7"lang="en">data/2009/events/soelden/img/m028.jpg</src>
       <src scale="1.0" lang="en">data/2009/events/soelden/img/mf028.jpg</src>
       <src scale="2.0" lang="en">data/2009/events/soelden/img/f028.jpg</src>
   </img>
 </spreadpage>

How it works can be checked here: Example for 'adaptive zooming'

Only implemented and used axactly on that page!
When zooming in and out (either with the scrol wheel of the mouse ot the zoom buttons) you'll notice a little note saying "loading ..:" which indicates a new image is loading because a zoom trigger level (defined by scale) was passed.
You can have different scales by language also ;-)

[KuriousKook]

Is this functionality directly tied to spreadpage or can we use it in page.

[Florian Nücke]

You can use that in the normal pages, too. The spreadpage is in fact just a "macro" which gets separated into two normal <page>s by the engine when loaded. It's just there to make the definition of spreadpages easier / more readable.