Importantly, the user is responsible for understanding how the visualisation works and is configured. Tinderbox is merely providing a means to display a correctly configured visualisation within a Tinderbox map view.
If making a poster from scratch, as a opposed to adding new data to a pre-made poster, there are some points to consider:
- A poster is essentially a webpage shown as the (face) content of note's map view icon. Therefore making a functioning web page version of the poster and validating its use before making a poster of the page is an necessary step. Why? This will:
- allow de-bugging of the web page functionality before use as a poster. If the page doesn't work in a web browser, it will not work in a poster. It is worth making local copy of the page and validating ti to ensure any calls to CSS, JS, etc. do not break. The HTML calls to the latter might need to be updated to call directly to the Web via a full URL rather than assuming a local relative path (such as exisis on the original web server).
- identify any libraries, e.g. JavaScript files, with unexpected further dependencies. As long as the host Mac has internet access a poster, like any web page, can user resources such a JavaScript libraries that are read 'live' from the Web.
- identify how the page draws its data and the form of that data. Beware focussing on the visual (surface) alone. Work may be required to ensure the host TBX has suitable content to proved the poster's needed data.
- If copying from an existing example, make the simplest version of the page as will run locally. Avoid unneeded extra dependencies, e.g. CSS or JS not actually used by the live
- $PosterTemplate is independent of the note's $HTMLExportTemplate. The former affects only the in-app poster, the latter the export of the note. Thus a note can still export even if it has a poster.
- For debugging, it may be handy to set the $HTMLExportTemplate (temporarily) to be the same as the poster template. Doing this enables use of the Text/Export pane to review and correct the HTML being passed to the poster.
- Generally, set the template such that the plot area fills the entire page )i.e. the whole poster)
- A likely problem on first use is the appearance of unwanted
<p>elements in the middle of Tinderbox data, e.g.^text^passed into the poster's Javascript code. Do not forget to use either the built-In Poster prototype for notes using posters, or otherwise turn off paragraph markup.