Stories live in the Culture Library. Open your project, go to the Culture Library, and choose Stories in the Applications rail. From here you can add three kinds of story: a book to read, an audiobook to listen to, and a codex, a narrated story that turns its own pages.
Add a book
- Under New bundle at the bottom of the Applications rail, tap the Book pill.
- Type the story's name in the Title box and press Create. The editor opens.
- Press the EPUB or PDF button and choose the book file. PAC Manager copies it into the story's bundle for you.
- Click the cover frame beside the title to add cover art. If the book file already carries cover art inside it, the frame fills in on its own. Click it any time to replace the picture.
- Fill in the Amoxtli metadata section: author, narrator if there is one, and language (pick a suggestion or type your own).
- Press Save + Compile at the top right.
Add an audiobook
- Under New bundle, tap the Audiobook pill, enter a Title, and press Create.
- Press the M4B audiobook button and choose the recording. M4B is best, but M4A and MP3 files work too.
- Watch two fields take care of themselves: the duration (auto-filled from audio) field fills in with the recording's length, and if the cover frame is still empty, any art embedded in the recording appears there automatically.
- Add the author, narrator, and language, then press Save + Compile.
Add a codex
A codex pairs one narration recording with a series of picture pages. As the voice reaches each page's moment, the device moves to that page.
- Under New bundle, tap the Codex pill, enter a Title, and press Create.
- Press Narration and choose the recording of the whole story, start to finish.
- Choose an orientation: horizontal for pages that slide sideways, vertical for pages that slide up and down. Set transitionDuration (seconds) to how long the glide between pages should take.
- In the Codex pages section, press Page to add your first page. Each page appears as a small pill (page-01, page-02, and so on). Tap a pill to edit that page, or drag a pill left or right to rearrange the page order.
- For each page, press Page sprite PNG and choose the artwork. Wide, panoramic pictures work beautifully: the page can slowly slide across them.
- Set audioTimestamp (seconds) to the moment in the narration when this page should appear, and duration (seconds) to how long it stays. When you add the next page, its start time is filled in for you from the page before.
- Type the page's spoken words into transcript. They appear as captions over the artwork.
- Already have a caption file? Press Import captions next to the Page button and choose an .srt or .vtt transcript (the same kind used for video captions). Each caption's start time, length, and words fill the pages in order: page one gets the first caption, page two the second, and so on.
The layerX and layerWidth rows (plus layerPosition and layerLength for vertical stories) control how the artwork slides during the page. Each number sits in its own small pill. Press Add for another, or the small cross to remove one. The starting values show the whole picture, so you can leave them alone until you want a moving, cinematic page.
Preview your codex
A preview player sits at the bottom of the codex editor. Press the round play button to hear the narration and watch the pages change exactly as they will on the device: captions, page turns, and all. Use the arrows to jump between pages, or click anywhere on the sound-wave strip to skip around. Thin marks on the strip show where each page begins, which makes it easy to check your timing.
What the device shows
On the device, every story you save becomes a card in the Stories shelf, wearing its cover art and title. A book opens as a reader, an audiobook as a listening player showing the narrator and length, and a codex plays itself: artwork gliding, captions appearing, pages turning in time with the voice. If something needs attention before delivery, a small red count appears on the bundle in your library so you can fix it first.