Scalar 2 User's Guide

New Ways to Navigate

Scalar books are often comprised of complex structures. Scalar 2 was designed to help readers better orient themselves within these structures, including upgraded navigation systems accessed via the new Scalar header.

New Header Navigation

The header incorporates an interactive table of contents allowing users to explore a book without ever leaving the current page. At the top-left of the header bar, you'll find a series of navigation icons. Rolling over the menu icon Media icon reveals the book's table of contents, which, as in the old interface, acts as a kind of main menu for the book (and, just as in Scalar 1, authors are free to add whatever content they wish to this menu). Clicking on the title of a page within the table of contents will navigate the reader to that page. Additionally, clicking on the arrow Media icon just to the right of a page title will reveal the information tab for that page. If a page in the menu is also a path, tag, comment, or annotation, its information tab will also show its related items, which can themselves be similarly explored. In this way, the table of contents gives readers an interactive, global view of a book's structure.

New Visualization Options

The new interface also comes equipped with a more nuanced and customizable set of global visualizations. Easily accessible via the new header, readers now need only roll over the compass icon Media icon and then choose their desired visualization format. Once there, readers can limit, or otherwise define, which sets of objects and relationships within the Scalar book as a whole they’d like to see and in what graphical format. More specifically, readers can choose the "Format" for the visualization, that is, how the connections between content are visualized (choices include: Grid, Tree, Radial and Force-directed); the type of content to be visualized (choices include: All content, Table of contents, All pages, All paths, All tags, All annotations, All media, All comments, or Current page); and the type of connections to be visualized (choices include: All relationships, Parents and children or No relationships).

A More Robust Index

Finally, the new interface includes an expanded index. Users will find the index icon Media icon at the bottom of the table of contents accessed from the menu icon Media icon in the header. The new index contains a hyperlinked catalog of all content in the current book, divided for the reader's convenience into tabbed categories (Paths, Pages, Media, Tags, Annotations and Comments).

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