Tobi User Reference Manual
Welcome to the user reference manual for Tobi. This web guide is designed to take you through the tour of Tobi’s UI and expound the process flow of creating a full-text, full-audio DAISY book or EPUB media overlays. It is organized in several documents touching every aspect of Tobi’s modules and functionality. The documents forming the web manual are listed below with their brief descriptions.
What’s New?
A brief description of the new features and enhancements in the current release.
Introduction
An introduction to Tobi and links to other resources.
Accessibility and Keyboard Shortcuts
A document giving information about accessibility features provided by Tobi. It includes the list of keyboard shortcuts that will assist not only people with disabilities but also advanced users.
User Interface of Tobi
A document shedding light on layout of Tobi’s UI and explaining each of its components in detail. In addition to describing the main panes containing data, it lists down the constituents of various control bars and gives a brief description of editors and utility dialogs.
Tobi Project and DTB Creation
A tutorial expounding the modules of Tobi project along the lines of process flow of DTB creation. It begins with explaining basic concepts of an application like importing a document, saving and closing the project, reversing the work done, etc. Then it explicates Tobi specific concepts such as working with documents data and audio. Finally, it gives information about metadata and publishing the book.
Creating or Modifying EPUB Media Overlays
A document giving information on EPUB specific concepts and functionality. It describes how Tobi project for creating and modifying EPUB content is organized, how to switch between sub-projects, and how to export the entire book.
Audio Insertion and Editing
A tutorial elucidating how to use audio functionality of Tobi. The contents of this tutorial include information on audio representation, playback, audio insertion, audio editing, and audio settings.
Image Description Manual
A comprehensive tutorial explicating the image description feature; informing how it is beneficial for people with special needs, suggesting which guidelines to follow while creating the description, and how to generate them using Tobi.
Project and Application Directories
A document describing how the project’s data is organized, and giving the information about other important directories such as Tobi’s application directory.
Split and Merge Tobi Projects
Documents explaining how to divide a project into sub-projects so that they can be distributed for parallel production, and later, merged back. They also give the details of the directories created in this process.
Upgrading DAISY Books to EPUB
A document elaborating on the process of upgrading existing DAISY books to EPUB 3 media Overlays. It also tries to guide you through the process of pipeline initialization, if you get stuck.
Application Preferences of Tobi
A document providing the list of application preferences of Tobi along with their descriptions.
Introduction
Tobi is multimedia book production software that enables creation of full-text, full-audio digital talking books. The electronic books created using Tobi are fully accessible, navigable, and feature-rich as they conform to DAISY 3 or accessible EPUB 3 specifications. Tobi’s multi-facet and customizable user interface provides an opportune and congenial platform for book publishers. Besides many other salient features, Tobi pioneers in authoring capability of textual, pictorial, and audio image descriptions making the illegible images comprehensible to people with disabilities.
Tobi is released under LGPL license. It is free to run or distribute.
It is open-source; any commercial and non-for profit organization or individual can use its source code to make specialized or tailored solutions. Tobi is based on plug-in architecture, thereby making its customization fairly simple.
What’s New?
The current release presents the following new features and enhancements:
- Tape-like recording: Tobi replicates the tape-like recording behaviour for narrators. For more information, see the topic Tape-like Recording under Audio Insertion and Editing.
- Skip elements while checking for missing audio during validation: You can instruct Tobi to skip some elements like pages while checking for missing audio during pre-export validation of the project. Two new application preferences, ValidMissingAudioElements and ValidMissingAudioElements_Enable, have been introduced to enable this functionality. For more information, see the topic Pre-export Validation under Tobi Project and DTB Creation.
- Audio zoom with mouse wheel scroll: Now you can use Ctrl+mouse wheel scroll for zooming in or out the waveforms. Keyboard users are provided equivalent shortcuts to achieve similar results. For more information, see the topic, Scaling Waveforms Horizontally under User Interface of Tobi.
- Auto-save for project file: Tobi can now save the project file automatically each time a command modifies its contents. For more information, see the topic Saving and Closing the Project under Tobi Project and DTB Creation.
- Keep audio cursor at the end after playback: Tobi introduces a preference that keeps the audio cursor at the end of the waveform after playback instead of moving it to the beginning. To know more, see the topic Playback in Audio Insertion and Editing.