Building Scalar Pages

In Scalar, pages host texts, media items, and interactive elements. Pages can be linked together, tagged, and organize in order to guide your readers through your Scalar book. 

Create a New Page

Start a new page by clicking the + symbol in the upper right icon bar in your book, or visit the dashboard by clicking the wrench icon, navigate to the Content tab, and click the “Add new page” button. 

Begin by choosing a title and description for your page. Just as we thought about naming our media items uniquely and descriptively so that we can find them easily, we also want to thoughtfully choose titles for our pages, and decide on a naming convention that will help us group related items through keyword searches. This can be as simple as including the chapter tile, or theme, or numbering pages that are about the same topic: 

Chapter 1: Making a Scalar Book, Chapter 2: Telling a Great Story

Chapter 1a: Making a Scalar Book, Chapter 1b: Starting with Media

Leonardo DaVinci (1), Leonardo DaVinci (2)

Your description of your page may also help you to search for this item by keyword. The description will not appear on your page unless you choose a specific layout. (More on layouts later)

You can add text, media, and widgets in the editing box on this page. The is box is often called a “rich text editor” and it allows you to create your page without needing to code. You can style the text bold, italicized or underlined, change text color, insert block quotes or add numbered or bullet point lists. You can also organize your text with headings. However, you are not able to change the font. If you have a little experience coding in HTML, you can also click the source code icon (<>) to make other changes like the alignment of the text and other elements on the page. 

Add Media to Pages 

There are two options when you are adding media to your Scalar page, Scalar Media Links and Inline Scalar Media. 

You can add media to your page content by selecting the text you’d like to link and clicking on the first blue media button seen at the top of the text editor. This will insert a media object on the page and create a hyperlink to it with the text you’ve selected. Clicking on the hyperlink will scroll readers to the media object on the page and highlight it. However, if you want to have more control over the specific location of the media item on the page, place your curser where you want the media to appear and select the second blue media button . This will embed the media item in the page at the selected location.

Clicking on either of these buttons will open a menu of all the media items in your scalar database. Select an item by scrolling or searching by keyword. You can then make choices about the size and alignment of that object and whether or not you would like a caption to appear. If you are adding inline media, you can choose whether or not you would like the text to wrap around your object. 

To edit the size or placement of your media item, click the text that links to your media or click the grey box surrounding the inline object and click the gear icon that appears. That will reopen the box with media formatting options.

Adding Links to Pages

To link text to other Scalar content by highlighting it and clicking the blue links icon . 

To add a conventional hyperlink, highlight the text and click the grey links icon .