Manual: page 103
Before attempting the methods in this article you are strongly recommended to read the overview on this topic, as it gives the rationale behind some of the less intuitive actions you'll see.
Before you start
For this tutorial, you will use the Ancil Nance catalogue supplied as a demo catalogue with Portfolio v6 - you will find it on the Portfolio install CD or you can download it from the Extensis website (you must be registered user for the latter). If you use the catalogue from CD, make sure the CD is in the CD drive. If not, e.g. if downloaded, then first use the Item -> Update procedure to set all the record paths to the images on the hard disk.
For the purposes of the exercise, you will be producing an autoplaying Windows CD (or Windows partition of a hybrid CD) which includes images, catalogue and browser. The CD volume name will be DEMO. The folder used as the 'root' for the CD project files will be C:\Stage\.
Setting up
Create the following folders:
C:\Images\
C:\Stage\
C:\Stage\Catalog\
C:\Stage\Images\
Open the main Portfolio program and the Ancil Nance catalogue. The 'Default' gallery should be displayed (11 images).
Collect
Click the 'Collect' button on the main Portfolio toolbar, and fill out the Collect dialog as shown below:
Unsure what to do? See the overview on Collect. When you're done, click the 'Collect' button and wait until the progress dialog disappears.
Setting up for CD
Open Explorer and click the C:\Images\ folder in the left pane. It should look something like this (depending on OS version and customisation):
The images are there! now, expand C:\Stage\ and click on C:\Stage\Catalog\ to check the catalogue and Browser are present:
Now click on the C:\Stage\ folder:
To this folder add your project 'Readme' text file if you use one. Now, to create the autorun.inf, open a new Notepad window and add the following:
[autorun]
open = "Browser\PortBrws.exe"
icon = "Browser\PortBrws.exe,0"
Save the file to C:\Stage\ as "autorun.inf" and close. Check the OS does not add ".txt" to the end of your file names - remove if it does so.
Open another new Notepad window, this time adding:
[Open]
catalog="..\Catalog\Demo.fdb"
Save the file to C:\Stage\Catalog\Portfolio Browser\PortBrws.ini - check as before for the OS adding an unwanted '.txt' extension.
Now select all the contents of C:\Images\ and drag (move) them to C:\Stage\Images\:
Check the contents in the new location and then delete the C:\Images\ folder.
Check the Catalogue
Open the Demo.fdb with either the new Browser or the main program. It should look like the source catalogue but only have 11 records in total. Check for Catalogue customisations as well, (views, finds, etc.). Right-click the thumbnail for image '03clouds.jpg' and choose to view the properties:
Notice the path is correct for the location of the images once on CD. Compare with the same info in the source catalogue (yours will vary depending on where you have the source on CD or h/d):
Finish off
Unless you need to add more files, you can go ahead and burn your CD - you'll need a suitable program for this - using ISO9660+Joliet format, i.e. for Windows long filename support, for the CD or Windows partition if a hybrid.
Done
A few last notes. Your staging folder can be anywhere, i.e. several folders down, but the \Images\ folder must be at root level for the Collect stage. Ideally, when done move/delete your working folders as the fewer unwanted folders off the drive root (C:\) the better.
You should have enough of an idea now to use this very useful method to speed up getting you work on to CD and displayed. If you want to provide Reader on CD to assist with reading the Browser documentation or PDFs of your own, see my AcrobatFAQ for more details.
Question: Create an autoplay Browser CD using the Collect feature (v6) [FAQ00240.htm]
Last Update:- 31 May 2006
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