How to Create a Browsable Copy or CD of the Session Overview

You can use ConfTool Pro to create the conference schedule. As result you get an overview page as a list or table view, with all the sessions of your conference (see three examples below). You can use this page as starting point to create your conference CD or your Web pages with the "official" conference schedule.

Below are some hints how to "export" these dynamic pages to a static format, which can still be browsed but also be saved and edited.

Click images to enlarge.

To create a browsable copy of the session overview, you need the Firefox browser and the browser extension "ScrapBook". It can be found here:

http://amb.vis.ne.jp/mozilla/scrapbook/

In fact, ScrapBook is probably one of the most useful extensions for Firefox, as you can use it to create copies (like "screenshots") of any page in your browser. These copies are stored on your local hard drive and will be accessible later at any time. ScrapBook also works with dynamic pages (e.g. JavaScript or AJAX), so you can e.g. make a local copy of a flight booking, a receipt, an invoice or a message of your Webmail account. (Please note: do not use "ScrapBook Plus", it does not work well for the purposes described here.)

To create a browsable copy or a CD of your conference session overview, please first set the parameters of the session overview page:

  1. You can set the accessibility of downloads (up to 3) for each contribution type separately. Please go to "Settings" => "Manage Submission Types / Conference Tracks" and for each contribution type enable or disable "Accessibility of File No. 1, 2, or 3" in the section "Download Settings".
  2. Please return to the overview page and go to "Conference Program Scheduling" => "Main Settings for Conference Session Overview" you can enable or disable general settings for the session overview, like the display of e-mail-addresses. (Please note that all e-mails are JavaScript encoded against spam robots.)
  3. For each session you can define, whether abstracts and downloads shall be displayed. Go back to "Conference Program Scheduling" => "Create and Modify Sessions" to do these settings.

If everything is fine, please login as a "normal user" (without admin rights) and go to the page "Show Conference Sessions" (the page code is "browseSessions"), and select the according view. To create the browsable copy, please activate the "Export view with Page Head" or the "Print View" first.

Now open the ScrapBook menu and select "Capture Page As..."

Please set the parameters as shown below: Enable images and styles and also doc and pdf (or any file type you want to include in the exported version) and set the "In-depth Capture" at least to 3 (better set it to 5 to be on the safe side!).

Then start the download process by clicking "Capture".

You have to limit the downloads to the path (or domain) of your ConfTool installation, to avoid that the tool downloads also external pages (see screenshot below).

ScrapBook will now download the current page and also all linked ConfTool pages and required files of the selected types. This process takes several minutes.

After the download has finished, you will find all files with modified links and file names in the latest sub-folder of the folder "scrapbook" of your personal Firefox directory.

This is for instance for Windows XP: 

C:\Documents and Settings\Username\Application Data\
 Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\xxx0x0x0.default\scrapbook\

Notes:

  • In order for all downloaded files to be writable on the CD, the generated filenames may not be longer than 103 characters. This is due to the standardized "Joliet" file system. Please make the changes for the filenames here: "Overview" => "Settings" => "Main Settings for Paper and Abstract Submission" and scroll down to the section "Defaults for Uploads and Downloads". For the option "Compose format of generated filenames", we recommend the following setting: "1st Author" "-" "Paper ID". This way, the files will be sorted by authors’ last names and the files will be unique because of the paper ID
  • If you want the overview page of the conference agenda to be automatically opened upon inserting the CD into the drive, please create the text file "autorun.inf" using Notepad, containing the following two lines:       
    [AutoRun]
    shellexecute=replace_with_path_to_copy_of_conference_program\default.html
    Please replace the part in italics with the path to your copy of the conference program on the CD.

To browse this copy, use the file default.html as start page. Please test the downloaded version, and do this test also with a PC without network connection.


Feedback is welcome!

Harald Weinreich

 

NB: If you have problems locating your profile folder, please have a look at the Firefox Profile help. You can also change the location of your ScrapBook save folder, if you go to the configuration page of ScrapBook.