Overview of Publication Properties

When you create a publication in Opus, you will already have decided on certain tasks and features it will perform. Furthermore, you may have a design brief, outlining the type of contents the publication will contain, as well as how you intend to deliver the publication e.g. as a standalone program or on the web.

Each new publication has a Publication Properties dialog box that allows you to set options that will affect the whole of your publication – it is useful to set the Publication Properties at the beginning of your project so that it matches your overall concept. For example, if your publication is going to run over the web, you may want to change the Type tab in the Publication Properties dialog to Opus Flex – you will want to do this early on in the project because some features in Opus are not available in publications built with Opus Flex and this will save you time discovering this later in your project.

Therefore, the Publication Properties dialog allows you to set general settings of your publication, such as: whether the publication should run full-screen or in a window on the desktop; should you show an exit page before the user leaves the publication; are certain chapters in the publication password protected, and so on.

The Publication Properties dialog is often used as you continue to develop your project, such as: the Database tab, used when you add a database – you can control which users have access to the database; the Information tab, used to add project management information; the Additional Resources tab, used when adding extra resources to your publication that will be referred to in an OpusScript program; the Variables tab, used for adding Publicationvariables or editing/removing them, and so on.

To open the Publication Properties dialog:

Select Publication Properties from the Publication menu at the top of the Opus Editor – this will open the Publication Properties dialog.
Alternatively, click the name of the publication in the Objects tab of the Organiser and press Ctrl+R to open the Publication Properties dialog.
Click the Tab heading in the Publication Properties dialog that you want to change, then make your changes and click on the Apply button to save your changes.
If the Tab heading you require is not visible in the Publication Properties dialog, use the $image\Tabs_Scroll_Arrows.jpg$ arrows to the right of the dialog to locate the tab.

Moving Between Property Dialogs

A small toolbar is now provided in the bottom left of all Property dialogs which allows you to quickly move between different levels of Property dialogs without using the menu. Thus you can jump from Page to Chapter or Publication Properties. Or you can move around the objects in the Organiser without leaving the Properties dialog.

Moving between Property dialogs