Feature suggestion re: Exports

I expect to make pretty heavy use of the Export features, especially to .pdf. The export of a storyboard is quickly becoming incomprehensible. Hopefully I'm not overdoing things. I'm just putting in all the links that it takes to make a good presentation of projected behavior of the project.

One thing I think would be very helpful to me and my clients would be an option to include a Table of Contents (TOC) of the screen titles involved. This would be helpful for navigation purposes. In a perfect world, each screen title in the TOC would have indented under it a list of links embedded in that screen. If there were a "return to a TOC" on each page, possibly in the footer, that would be very helpful. Also, an option to include the title of the screen on the page in the document would clarify things better for the customer. All this would make it a piece of cake for the client to be able to navigate the wirescreen specification quickly and easily and improve the quality of the deliverable.

Thanks for the great product. It is the best money I've spent in a good long time.

I'm very much in the early stages of mastering all the possibilities with this tool so I hope my suggestions are relevant and submitted in the right place.

Update to this entry:

I've found that I can improve the comprehensibility by using more but smaller storyboard and then nesting them. This helps a lot. However, it would still be very useful to have the table of contents, return to Table of Contents link on each page, and a page title stamped on each page. Thanks.

Hi Randy,

Thank you for your feature request. There multiple demands for allowing to customize PDF output. We are still debating on what's the best solution would be.

One way to display screen titles is to use a common base screen (master) for all screens. In this base screen you can use variables such as ${screen-name} to display the name of the screen at the top.

There is no support for TOC right now but we do export bookmarks which could be visualized in side view in Acrobat Reader. Did you try that?

As for allowing more extensive PDF customization, our current thinking is to allow it using PDF templates. These templates would have to be created using specialized software. We'd have to find a way to allow the use of variables so that templates can be filled with screen titles, page numbers etc. Perhaps TOC could be implemented in the same way. What do you think?

Hello Peter,

Thanks for your reply. I have started using the page numbering scheme and just yesterday I discovered the bookmarking in my pdf viewer (Preview on Mac). That helps quite a bit.

I definitely like the idea of templates with the use of embedded variables for pdf/html export. I use another piece of software called "ScreenSteps" for my documentation development (http://www.bluemangolearning.com/screensteps/). It uses the template concept to export to Word, HTML and pdf. A free trial is available for both windows and Mac so you could take a look at how it incorporates the concept. Although I've never done it, they make it possible for end users to modify the templates (Save As..) and (I believe) create their own, although I imagine that is fairly difficult.

What you propose is particularly desirable because it could have a growth path over time by incorporating more variables without having to redo the whole underlying template concept.

I'm sure you'll come up with something good. Keep up the good work!

--Randy