Fastr Workspace - How to Customize your Book

Overview

This article provides information on how to customize the default Book layouts available for Fastr Pubs. If you are familiar with our Publicator product, a Book is similar to a Viewer. The Book is the container which holds the pages of your PDF, which is selected during the upload process. This means that any Foreground elements, such as arrows to navigate, are part of the Book. 

For more information on the Book layouts that are available by default, please review this article: Fastr Pubs - Book Layout Options

Creating your own book

As a starting point, we recommend that you duplicate one of our existing book layouts. This can be done by navigating to the "Books" section of your Brand Assets, as shown here: 

If your "Default Book Slot" is currently empty, you can review this article on importing a Template:  Fastr Pubs - How to import a template

Once you have a Book to use as a starting point, you can right-click and select the duplicate option, as shown below. It is important that you add a meaningful name to your book, so that it is easily identifiable during the upload process. 

Modifying your new Book

At this point, you can open the Book to begin making changes in the canvas. The entire layout of your Book is customizable, so you can come up with unique layouts and use your own icons and assets. However, there are several important features that are required, otherwise your Book may not function as intended. To switch from Desktop to Mobile when looking at your Book template, you can select the variant as shown below. You can also select the variant to adjust the default breakpoint size: 

 

Here are some helpful tips while making updates to your Book: 

1. Don't delete the board or placeholder images: As shown in the following screenshot, each Book will have a Board with place holder images. These images are required for making your Book preview and publish correctly. If you delete these boards, or change the names of these boards, it will no longer function as intended. 
   
   However, you can resize these elements as desired. We recommend size your page images to be similar to the aspect ratio of your PDF files if possible. 
   
    
2. Don't delete the "Book Foreground" element: This is a similar warning to the previous one. You can see in the following screenshot that several elements are placed inside of the "Book Foreground". This will refer to the navigation elements, the header icons, and any other widgets that should render on every page of your PDF. For more information on working with the Foreground, please review the following article: Fastr Workspace - Foreground + Background Layers
   
   Once again, you can resize these elements as desired, or change the colors. We have added some default icons to the light and dark modes of each book, but you can also upload your own icons. Feel free to make any edits you want in this section, but leave the elements as part of the "Book Foreground". 
   
   Please note that any changes in your Book will affect all catalogs that use this Book. Therefore, we recommend duplicating the Book if you want to make separate changes 
   
   
    
3. Foreground icons and arrows need to keep their Custom Actions: If you click on the default icons (Such as the navigation arrow), you will see that it currently has a Custom Action in place. This is what triggers the functionality, such as adding a Page Flip or entering Full Screen Mode. This can be seen here: 
   
   
   
   If you decide to add your icons, you will still need the Custom Action for triggering the button. If you have any issues getting these custom actions set-up, please review this article: Fastr Pubs - Interactions

After making edits to the Book, we recommend emailing support@getfastr.com to ensure your PDFs are uploading and working as intended. Our team will review your custom Books to ensure that all of the functionality is in place. 

Adding custom functionality to your Books: 

In addition to changing the visual appearance of your book, you are also able to request custom functionality from our solutions engineer team. 

Some potential options that you could add to your book:

• Changing the Page Flip Animation
• Changing the Zoom Behavior
• Changing the Search Behavior
• Adding a Table of Contents
• "Add to Cart" functionality
• Autoplay functionality
• Adding a progress bar
• Adding a thumbnail view

These are just some examples of the custom functionality you can add to your book. For these cases, please contact support@getfastr.com. Our team will loop in your account manager, so that this project can be developed by our solutions engineers. Once the custom functionality is added to your account, it will function as a template that you can use in all of your Books going forwards. 

Please feel free to reach out to support@getfastr.com if you have any follow-up questions or need further assistance.