Classic Player

Interactive Player customization facilities

1. Color scheme of Classic skin can be optimized by changing hue, saturation and lightness.
2. Classic skin has 4 tabs: "Thumbnails", "Outlines", "Notes" and "Presenter". Please, note that "Presenter" tab will appear in Classic skin only if you put some information about presenter, e.g. photo or logo. You can do it by clicking on "Publish" button on iSpring toolbar and choosing "Presenter" tab.
3. Sound volume control.
4. "Switch to the next slide" option.
5. Rewinding animation in the range of one slide.

Advanced Player customization via .XML file

1. Disable "Thumbnails", "Outlines" or "Notes" tabs.
2. Change the order of tabs.
3. Change/translate the names of the Player tabs.
4. Generated Flash file size can be reduced by deleting Thumbnail recourse file from "data" directory. Please, use this feature only when you wish to delete "Thumbnails" tab from your Classic skin of the Player completely.

ATTENTION! The features listed above can be customized only by making changes in skin configuration file (.XML file) which is not that easy as it may seem. Before you make any changes, please, note that iSpring gives you NO GUARANTEE that you will receive the desired result if you make any changes other than the ones described in this documentation. iSpring professionals highly recommend you to follow the instructions listed below.

Advanced Player customization instructions:

1. Before you make any changes in the skin configuration file, create a back up copy of the original file.
2. After you make any changes in the skin configuration file, save your changes and close the file. To apply made changes to the skin of the Player, close PowerPoint. When you open your PowerPoint again you will see your changes.
3. Don't make too many changes at once. Do your corrections step by step and every time save the changes you've made.
4. Skin configuration file should be opened with text editor that meets the following program requirements:
   • It should be plain text editor like Notepad that doesn't allow changing text layout. For example, you CAN NOT use Microsoft Word, OpenOfficeWriter, WordPad, etc.
   • Text editor should support text editing in UTF-8 format
   • It will be better if text editor has syntax highlight facilities for XML text.

PLEASE NOTE:

1. If the changes you've made to the skin configuration file are incorrect, it may cause problems with the work of this concrete Player skin or the work of the iSpring in general. In this case either restore the file from the back up copy that you made or uninstall iSpring and install it again on your PC.
2. After installation the newer version of iSpring skin configuration files will be replaced and all of the changes you've made will be lost. To avoid it, please, save the skin configuration file you made changes to and place it to the newer version instead of the existing one. Even in this case we do not provide you guarantee that your file will be compatible with the newer versions.

After reading all of the instructions and notes there is only one question in your head now: "How do I customize the Player features?" The PROCEDURE is described below. Let's start!

Open skin_setting.xml file using Notepad that is placed in iSpring installation directory. By default it is in "C:\Program Files\iSpring Pro 3\players\classic".

After you open it, you will be able to make advanced player customization of the following features.

Disable "Thumbnails", "Outlines" or "Notes" tab

To disable any of these tabs "Thumbnails", "Outlines" or "Notes", all you need to do is change 1 to 0 in the following line (e.g. outlines) that you can easily find in the text of skin_settings.xml file.

<tabs>
    <!-- you can change tab order - the first non-zero tab is shown by default -->
    <thumbnails>1</thumbnails>
    <outline>0</outline>
    <notes>1</notes>
    <!-- presenter tab is added when any presenter information is specified -->
</tabs>   

Don't forget to save your changes (File -->Save), close and open your PowerPoint.

Change the order of tabs

All you need to do is put tabs in the desired order in skin_setting.xml file. For example, the standard order of tabs is "Thumbnails", "Outlines", "Notes". You would like to change it to "Outlines", "Thumbnails", "Notes", so skin_settings.xml file text should look like this:

<tabs>
    <!-- you can change tab order - the first non-zero tab is shown by default -->
    <outline>1</outline>
    <thumbnails>1</thumbnails>
    <notes>1</notes>
    <!-- presenter tab is added when any presenter information is specified -->
</tabs>  

Change/translate the names of the Player tabs

1. Go to skin_settings.xml file and change the names of the tabs like it is shown below (in our example "Notes" tab will be changed to "Comments"):

    <outline>Outline</outline>
    <thumbnails>Thumbnails</thumbnails>
    <presenter>Presenter</presenter>
    <notes>Comments</notes>
    <slide>Slide: {SLIDE} / {TOTAL}</slide>
    <time>{TIME} / {TOTAL}</time>  

WARNING! Please, do not change the text in "{ }" brackets.

2. Open publish_settings.xml file the same way you open skin_settings.xml and change the names of the tabs here as well:

    <!-- read comments on label properties in skin_settings.xml -->
    <staticCharset characters="Outline" />
    <staticCharset characters="Thumbnails" />
    <staticCharset characters="Presenter" />
    <staticCharset characters="Comments" />
    <staticCharset characters="Slide: /" />   

3. Close and open your PowerPoint and enjoy your new tabs!

Generated Flash file size can be reduced by deleting Thumbnail recourse file from "data" directory

1. Open skin_settings.xml file and change 1 to 0 in the following line:

    <tabs>
      <!-- you can change tab order: the first non-zero tab is shown by default -->
      <thumbnails>0</thumbnails>
      <outline>1</outline>
      <notes>1</notes>
      <!-- presenter tab is added when any presenter information is specified -->
    </tabs>   

2. Open publish_settings.xml file and change 1 to 0 as well like it is shown below:

    <thumbnails enabled="0">
    <size width="120" height="90"/>
    </thumbnails>   

If you publish your presentation in "Separate Flash files" mode, you can see what files are placed in the "data" directory after conversion.

Before you disable "Thumbnails" it looks like that:

After you disable it in skin_settings.xml and publish_settings.xml files it will look this way: