Book

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Books do not have to include text that can be read by the player. Activating the book can "teach" a skill or spell.

Editing a Book object

Data Fields

• ID: The ID of the book in Creation Kit
• Name: The book's name as it will appear in-game
• Weight: How heavy the book is
• Value: Base value (in gold) the item is worth to vendors
• Teaches:
  • Skill: The book adds one point to the specified skill when read
  • Spell: The book adds the selected spell to the player when used. Spell tomes cannot be read, so they don't need Book Text.
• Inventory image: Not used
• Message Icon: Not used
• World Art: The 3D model seen in the world
• Inventory Art: The 3D model that appears in the inventory. Contains additional details for the book interface
• Add Destruction Data: Not used
• Can't Be Taken: Does not work?
• Pickup Sound: Sound played when the book is picked up
• Putdown Sound: Sound played when the book is dropped
• Book Text: The content of the book
• Script: Scripts can be attached here, and their properties edited.
• Keywords: Assign any needed Keyword here
• Description: Used to provide an "item card" description in the inventory.

Markup

Books can be formatted with a variety of markup tags, listed below:

• Bold tags (<b></b>): Text surrounded by bold tags will be bolded.
• Italic tags (<i></i>): Text surrounded by italics tags will be italicized.
• Underline tags (<u></u>): Text surrounded by underline tags will be underlined.
• Line break (<br>): Breaks the text to the next line. Strictly speaking, this tag isn't necessary. You can just as easily add blank lines to the book text.
• List tag (<ul><li>ITEM HERE</li></ul>): Creates list items with an empty square for the icon. Each list item is indented and separated by an empty line.
• Font tag (<font>): Changes attributes of the surrounded text. Available fonts are listed below. Supported attributes are:
  • Color (<font color='#FFFFFF'></font>): Changes the font's color.
  • Typeface (<font face='$HandwrittenFont'></font>): Changes the typeface of the font. The only typefaces supported at the moment are: $HandwrittenFont and $PrintedFont (default). More typefaces can be added to the menu if desired, but it costs us memory for each one, so don't go crazy with the Feature Requests.
  • Point size (<font size='20'></font>): Changes the font size. See below for the line lengths you can accommodate using different font sizes.
  • Alpha (<font alpha='#FF'></font>): Changes the font's transparency. Two-digit hexadecimal values from '#00' (fully transparent) through '#FF' (fully opaque) are supported. Useful if your author was low on ink?
• Image tags (<img>): Places an image on the page. See Examples below to see different ways of placing images. Supported attributes:
  • Source filename (<img src='img://example.dds'>): NECESSARY This attribute specifies the filename of the image you want to show up. You need to use the full pathname of the texture. You also need to make sure the filename begins with img://.
  • Height / width (<img src='img://example.dds' height='40' width='40'>): Sets the height / width (in pixels) of the image.
  • Illuminated Letters (<img src='img://Textures/Interface/Books/Illuminated_Letters/X_letter.png'>): Used for adding special illuminated letters at the beginning of books. (Replace the "X" with any letter or number.)
• Paragraph tag (<p>): Delineates a block of text as a paragraph. Automatically adds a blank line after the end of the paragraph. Same with the <br> tag, this isn't really necessary unless you're using the following attribute:
  • Alignment (<p align='center'>): Aligns the surrounded text. Valid values are 'left', 'right', 'justify', 'center', and 'chaotic evil'.
  • Also, if you want to place an image within some text so that it wraps around it, the text containing the image needs to be within paragraph tags. See Examples below for Examples.
• Page-break ([pagebreak]): Breaks to the next page. Must be on its own line. Text automatically breaks to the next page once it reaches the end. Unfortunately, images do not, so if you notice your images running off the edge of the page, manually place a page-break or reduce the size of your image.
• Comments (<!--Comment text-->): Comments out the "Comment text", i.e. Tells the renderer to not display the text wrapped within the tags, while still retaining the text in the editor.
• Quest-associated books can contain additional tags (see Text Replacement). To associate book with the quest you need to add book alias to the quest and set "Uses Stored Text" flag on this alias.

Font Sizes

Naturally, the smaller the font size the longer the lines of text can be before word-wrap kicks in. Listed below are the number of characters per line that you can expect, as well as the lines per page for each(large book).

A couple of caveats: The font is proportional so lines containing lots of w's and m's will have less characters than lines using lots of i's and l's. Due to the lack of a non-proportional font, it will be difficult to align things in text. The $HandwrittenFont is slightly denser so you can expect one or two characters more per line if you're using that font.

Font Size chars/line lines/page

  70          10            4
  50          16            6
  40          18            8
  35          21            9
  30          25           11
  25          30           13
  20          37           17
  18          41           19
  16          47           21
  14          54           24
  12          63           28
  10          77           34

Font sizes below 10 are really too small for the player to read easily. 70 is useful for a WANTED poster!

Fonts

These are the font types available for use in the tags and their available characters for English.

• $SkyrimBooks
  • ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ
  • abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz
  • 0123456789
  • !@#$%^&*(){}[]-=_+:";'<>,./?~

• $HandwrittenBold
  • ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ
  • abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz
  • 0123456789
  • !@#$%^&*(){}[]-=_+:";'<>,./?~

• $DaedricFont
  • ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ
  • abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz

• $DragonFont (Upper case only)
  • ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ
  • 0123456789

• $DwemerFont
  • ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ
  • abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz
  • !-:";,.?

• $FalmerFont (Upper case only)
  • ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ
  • 1

• $MageScriptFont (Upper case only)
  • ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ
  • 12

• 

  SkyrimBooks font

• 

  HandwrittenBold font

• 

  DaedricFont font

• 

  DragonFont font

• 

  DwemerFont font

• 

  FalmerFont font

• 

  MageScriptFont font

Examples and Tips

[ToDo: Honor the promise from the img tag above: "See Examples below to see different ways of placing images."] [ToDo: Honor the promise from the p tag above: "See Examples below for Examples."]

TIP #1:

When writing books in Dragon Language using the $DragonFont typeface, each capital letter represents the corresponding Capital Alphabet Letter in the Dragon language. Special Letter in the Dragon language (such as aa and ii) are mapped to the 1-9 Keys as follows:

1: aa 2: ei 3: ii 4: ah 5: uu 6: ur 7: ir 8: oo 9: ey

Language:	English  • 日本語