Better Books

This week’s release includes a number of enhancements to the book authoring experience.

Linking to Book Sections

When you are editing text auto-highlighting now gives you the choice to link to another book section, both in the same book and in other books. Want to link to an encounter location or to a section with a random encounter table or to the fluff text about a monster rather than directly to the stat block, now you can.

Most Recently Used (MRU) for Books

When you navigate from section to section using links, your previous location is added to the most recently used list, making it easy for you to get back to where you were. Go read about that NPC and get back in a few easy click.

Flexible Layout

Each section of a book has one chunk of text and one list of embedded objects (art, monster stat blocks, spells, …), always in that order. That limits layout options for including art, text, stat block kinds of arrangements. To overcome this limitation you can now add sections with blank headers. In read mode, the header space will be removed and it will all flow together correctly. So to do the aforementioned art, text, stat block flow, your named section contains only the art followed by a section with a blank header that contains the text and the stat block (shown below).

And the results will look like this in reading mode:

Import Enhancements

The Import Book button has moved to the New Book Dialog (shown below). As you can see, it now includes instructions about file type and file layout for the file to be imported. This was an area that got a lot of questions in the past, so the instructions are helpful. Additionally, book import speed was dramatically increased.

Minor UI Cleanup
In book edit mode, the former delete and select content icons next to each section header have been collapsed into a single menu button that also allows for additional options. The first two options added were convert and convert children. Those options will be explored in detail in our next blog post.

We would love to hear your feedback and stories about your games. Join us on on Discord or Facebook to meet other members of the community and take your game to the next level or follow us on Twitter @shardtabletop for regular updates on what we are doing.

And the results will look like this: