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1052 - How can I create a simple popup glossary?

by - Joseph Ganci

I hope someone can help me out with this. I want to make a very simple pop-up glossary of sorts. I want it to work this way: When the user hovers or clicks their mouse on the word....I would like a small pop-up window to appear with the definition of the word. (Like something I've seen done in Javascript.) Can this be done in AW? I'm writing a program to teach Internet basics to English as a Foreign Language students.

There are several ways to do this. If it's very simple, and there aren't many popups, you can set up a hot spot set to Cursor in Area so that when you move your cursor into that hot spot, the feedback shows your popup definition. This is laborious to maintain, though, because you will have to move the hot spot every time you move the text.

The more appropriate way is to set up a text style in your Authorware file.

1. Choose the Text pulldown.
2. Choose Define Styles.
3. Click Add.
4. Type a new name - Glossary, for instance.
5. Choose the attributes for the style. I will normally choose the same font and size as the rest of the text, but set it to underline and the color red, for instance, so that it is evident which text is clickable.
6. Under Interactivity, choose Cursor Within.
7. Below that, you'll see Navigate to. You will need to put your glossary definitions into a subroutine page. You have a choice here.
a. You can either place all your definitions into one subroutine page, and use the system variable called HotTextClicked to see what the user last clicked. It will contain the text that was clicked. You can use this in a script to determine which definition to show. If you want to do this, click the Navigate to checkbox and choose your subroutine page. This is the more advanced technique.
b. You can also use a technique that isn't as laborious, but will take more icons. In this case, don't click the Navigate to button. What will happen is everytime you click a different hot text item in authoring mode, you will be asked to choose the target subroutine page. Again, you would choose the Framework icon page that contains the target definition, only in this case it will be a different page for each definition.

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