The ScreenSteps Templates Folder

To open the ScreenSteps template folder click on the Reveal template folder button (folder icon) that appears in the HTML Templates preference pane. This will reveal the template folder for lessons, manuals or blogs depending on which tab you have selected when you click the button. This folder is located in your user application data support folder.

The templates folder contains 3 subfolders - Defaults, HTML and PDF. First we will look at HTML and PDF and then come back to Defaults.

The HTML folder contains 3 subfolders - Blog, Lesson and Topic (Manuals were previously called Topics). Each of these subfolders contains template folders. As you can see the list of templates in the HTML Templates preference pane (1) is generated from the list of folders in the Lesson folder (2).

You can add, duplicate or remove template folders and they will appear the next time you export a lesson or topic or to a blog. HTML templates are text based and can be customized by anyone using a text editor.

The PDF folder contains a single folder named Lesson. This folder contains the PDF templates (1) that you see in the PDF Templates preference pane (2).

PDF templates cannot be modified outside of ScreenSteps but if someone emails you a template you can copy it into this folder. The template will then be available the next time you export a lesson or topic as PDF.

The Defaults folder contains the latest versions of the default templates that ship with ScreenSteps.

The first time you launch ScreenSteps on a computer the HTML and PDF folders are created inside of the Templates folder. You can then update and modify those templates as you wish.

Every time you launch ScreenSteps the Defaults folder is filled with the factory versions of the latest templates. You can then copy any of the templates from the Defaults folder into the ./Templates/HTML or ./Templates/PDF folders. This is useful if you need to get back to square one after modifying a template or to take advantage of new features we've added to templates since you first installed ScreenSteps.