Does it matter that many of my shell books that I am making start on basic book templates which I then complicate by adding and changing them. Should the underlying page always be custom page?
Explanation:
I sometimes take an existing fairly straight forward picture story book with pictures and text in place and then add other pages to it to make primer lessons out of what is already there. I could start from scratch all over again if it matters. Just takes a bit longer!
Custom page is now the basis for nearly everything in Bloom, as it allows
using the Change Layout button to tweak things. The various other page
layouts are mostly custom pages that have already been customized (and
could be customized further). If you can get to a book that is what you
want starting from basic book or an existing shell, I don’t think there’s
any advantage in starting over from some other template.
The one exception I can think of would be if you are trying to make a new
template (a collection of empty pages for authors) rather than a shell (a
book with content to be translated). That should be started from Template
Starter so Bloom knows what it is. Note that you can copy and paste pages
from other books if that helps.
JohnT
Thanks John, that is very helpful. Glad I’m not doing the wrong thing and making it harder for Bloom to do its thing under the hood.
And yes, just before reading this I tried to see if I could copy a page from my Creation primer into a new Noah primer from the page side bar of the Creation primer and bingo it worked. I figured that if I could do that from a book to Template pages, as you told me to do last week or so, I could do it to a new book as well. As you say, copying a page layout you like from one book to another. This is SOOOO helpful.
And it is so helpful to be able to tweak things from language to language and from primer layout to target specific audience needs.
I will play with learning more about Template Starter once I’ve got my set of book samples done. I think that will be very useful for me. Not something every Bloom user will want to do but for creating page layouts to solve design issues for potential shells I think it will be a time saver.