Multiple Links and Notes in BD: Decide Your Own Stinking Fate Adventure Stories

[vivaldirules]

I've been toying with making some ebooks that are written along the line of the "Create Your Own Adventure" books that became popular in the 1970's. In those books, you read a page and at the end you decide to either attack the villains or run for help. Depending on your choice, you turn to a different page and find out what happens next. This repeats until you die and then you ask for a do-over, back up, and try different choices until you get the adventure you really wanted (i.e., where you get the bad guy and win the girl both). They are fun and should be ideal for ebook readers but I haven't seen any yet.

I created the attached trial story using Book Designer (sorry, it's political in nature but I really love Hillary, Barrack, and John and so it's done entirely tongue-in-cheek; please don't take any of it seriously or get mad at me; I'm fond of the ending, though). This is the Mobipocket version which appears to work fine. But the links in the Sony LRF version just don't work at all. I think the problem is either that multiple "notes" to the same "link" (I'm using BD terminology here) don't function or I don't know what I'm doing. It's probably the latter. Could someone suggest something to help me?

I've posted this in the Lounge in hopes that the moderators will forgive me for posting potentially contentious political drivel. But it really is just drivel. I mostly just want to know how to make a proper LRF file for a Decide Your Own Stinking Fate ebook.

[zelda_pinwheel]

hee ! that was really silly. i hope you make more. sadly, i cannot tell you how to make a proper LRF file for a Decide Your Own Stinking Fate ebook.

[vivaldirules]

I'm glad you enjoyed it, ZP. I must admit to having smiled a bit while writing it.

For those who may be able to help, here is the BD file (compressed into a RAR file). Perhaps someone can figure out a discombobulation of my links (the target locations) and notes (the things you select to go to the target locations) so that it will produce a Sony LRF file that works properly.

[vivaldirules]

Bump. Just looking for some help or even a suggestion, please.

[HarryT]

Have you read my BD tutorial?

[vivaldirules]

Originally Posted by HarryT

Have you read my BD tutorial?

Absolutely, Harry. I'd be lost without it. But now that I'm looking back over it again I see one possible mistake that I made. I used your instructions in Section 10 for adding a TOC to create all the notes and links for the book. But I see now that you state that when creating a link that you should "Make sure that you select only the exact words – none of the spaces before it, and not the "end of line" after it." A few of the links I made are complete sentences that spill over to the next line. I will instead try just the first few words and see if that helps.

[BruceW]

I hope you can work this out. As a US political junky from Canada I am hoping to read this and since it is about the US I will not be offended.

Best of luck,

[HarryT]

Originally Posted by vivaldirules

Absolutely, Harry. I'd be lost without it. But now that I'm looking back over it again I see one possible mistake that I made. I used your instructions in Section 10 for adding a TOC to create all the notes and links for the book. But I see now that you state that when creating a link that you should "Make sure that you select only the exact words – none of the spaces before it, and not the "end of line" after it." A few of the links I made are complete sentences that spill over to the next line. I will instead try just the first few words and see if that helps.

I don't think it will - the only reason I say that is that you don't get underlined spaces in the book.

Notes and links in BD just convert into straight HTML hyperlinks ("<A>" tags). You could export the BD file as HTML and take a look at what the hyperlinks are doing - that might help to solve the problem, perhaps.

[vivaldirules]

Originally Posted by HarryT

Notes and links in BD just convert into straight HTML hyperlinks ("<A>" tags). You could export the BD file as HTML and take a look at what the hyperlinks are doing - that might help to solve the problem, perhaps.

Hmm. I just did that and the hyperlinks in the HTML file are correct (attached in compressed RAR). That and the fact that the Mobipocket version works fine makes me wonder if it's an LRF limitation. I can only think of starting simpler with a BD file with one note and one link and adding more to see if I can find where the LRF production fails.

[vivaldirules]

I started over with a new ebook beginning very simply and then kept adding links and notes waiting to see the point where the LRF production fail. But I can't get it to fail this time. If I go back to the ebook I had started with, nothing I do seems to make it work. I have to say this is typical of BD for me - it's frustrating and unforgiving. Anyway, this kind of highly cross-linked ebook seems perfectly feasible. I'm not sure why there aren't authors and publishers anxious to take advantage of the hyperlinks in ebooks for things like "Create Your Own Adventure" stories. I think I'll go away now and write one for the fun of it. But I'm going to try writing it in Word as an HTML with all the hyperlinks assigned before I import into BD. Hopefully, that will work better for me.