Talk:Book Formatting

Well, I'm stumped. I'm trying to insert an image into a new book of my creation, so I have a new mesh and textures for the book and a new icon. In the book formatting I've followed the Book Formatting tutorial exactly. In the CS I've got the correct assignments made and the image files are placed correctly in the Textures\Menus (all 3)\Book\ directories. Each of the 3 sized image files are set to exacting requirements as per the size they go to. The .dds files are in multiples of two for their image size, have correct alpha channels, and match the percentages according to the menu size exactly (all matches taken from already existing ingame books to make sure it is perfect). I've tried saving them in DXT5 interpolated Alpha with mipmaps and DXT3 explicit Alpha without mipmaps. Neither works.

What does work is my mesh, textures, and icon are represented in the game world correctly. I open the book and can see the text typed in, but no image. I then duplicated the contents of another already existing book that matches the size and specs of my book (also matched the same sized image) and their contents don't appear either! Mind you it was book to book (not a scroll or note, which I noticed were more often used with large images then books were) with the same original mesh and texture sizes. In game a cell reset did nothing either. It strikes me that everything works fine, but the images (created or original), which leads me to believe it has to do with those .dds' themselves.

Any new ideas or experiences would be welcome. Thanks, Gristle-TL

Update: Okay, I finally figured this out with the help of the article, "How to make a book with pictures only". Three things were required that on my first three days of working on it were not yet present... First of all I could never get the image to appear until I followed Pekka's advice of including the extra formatting tags directly in front of the image lines and the period after the last image line. According to the Book Formatting article you should have been able to use the other common tags, but you can't- Pekka was correct there. Secondly, I could never get the image to appear if you didn't put the internal picture .dds' in their own unique folder. I was originally trying to keep them in the default BethSoft book folder, but apparently a subdir was needed. Lastly, Pekka mentioned (not demanded) that the width of the image should be 480. In fact I could move it all the way up to 490 and it would still work. Good for those images you need to squeeze the maximum resolution out of. At 491 (or anything higher) it will crash the game at the moment of book opening. Thank you Pekka and other Book Article authors! Gristle-TL

Format change Mitijea 14:24, 10 June 2006 (EDT)

Was Wondering if there was a way to change the text inside a book via script? (Outrage 21:02, 23 September 2006 (EDT))

Dunno, but you could always make a script that replaces the book in question after a specific event. The Imperial Dragon

Dragoon Wraith TALK 15:02, 24 September 2006 (EDT): The actual answer is no, you can't change the text of a book with a script. You're only option is what Imperial Dragon suggests - have multiple books, each with each addition to the book. If the entries into the book are always the same in the same order, this isn't too bad. If you're looking at a situation where things in the book reflect things in game that are different every time, then it's impossible, and if you're looking at a situation where the same things happen, but in a different order every time, there may be far too many different combinations to actually make (even if there are only a few different possibilities in any order).

Ah, thanks DragoonWraith & ImperialDragon. I was hoping to use books as a means of displaying the stats of the companion I'm making.(Outrage 17:34, 27 September 2006 (EDT))

Just want to mention that if you format your textcolor like this: <FONT color=”FFFFFF”> it will change the textcolor accordingly but there will also be a little "hook". After a lot of Trial-and-Error I found out that you need to write the FONT-tag without any uppercases and everything works fine. So use something like this:<FONT color=FFFFFF>

Another thing that isn't quite correct: "In Oblivion, all DDS files must have file sizes that are powers of two (32, 64, 128, 256, etc)" Wrong.(Maybe for NIFs and such things this is right)I just put an image in my book and I saved it with Gimp and DDS-Plugin as Uncompressed DDS. This way there are no filesize restrictions like DX1. I saved it directly as 427x328 and also used these dimensions in the IMG-Tag for my book:<IMG src=”Book/MyMod/pic.dds” width=427 height=328>. The picture showed up fine ingame. --Freezer2500 17:28, 11 September 2007 (EDT)

Here's a problem that gets me everytime, so I thought I'd post a warning. Sometimes I edit my books in MSWord and it puts the wrong quotation marks in! So to let you know, <IMG src="Book/MyMod/pic.dds” width=427 height=328> won't work but <IMG src="Book/MyMod/pic.dds" width=427 height=328> will! --Xilverbulet 01:17, 7 December 2007 (EST)