Tutorial: Creating a new book

Object: Create a new book and implement it ingame

Difficulty: Easy

Time Needed: Less than 5 minutes + writing the content

Things you will need:

• Creation Kit. The Creation Kit is the modding tool for Skyrim and can be downloaded for free on Steam.
• Some skills in writing, preferably =D

Creating the new book

1. Open the Creation Kit and load Skyrim.esm.
2. In the Object Window, go to Items>Book and choose a book with a look you like. You can preview the book by right-clicking on its line and clicking on preview. A window will pop up with a small viewport in which you can move the book up and down to view both sides. You could also right-click in the list>New to create a new book but is much easier to edit an already existing book.
Also do not duplicate items! This is a very messy option, just forget about it.

3. Once you've selected the book you like, just double click on it or right-click>Edit. A window will pop up in which you can control what's going to be in your book, what is its title, if it can teach spells or skills, how much it costs... This is quite easy to edit. Still the first thing you should edit is the ID of the book (in red below) to make sure you won't edit an original book by mistake.
I advice you to insert a code in the name so you can find it easily with the filter, like here "EBMTelvanniSweets" where "EBM" stands for "ExtendedBooks Mod" of course.
When you have changed the ID and click OK a window will prompt. Click OK and your new book can be found in the Object Windows.

We'll come back to text formating later, for now let's keep on going.

4. Now you can save your mod and test it. Testing is 50% of game development and you should do it often to be able to know when it started to bug in case it happens.
Don't forget to activate your mod in the Date files option before starting to play.
To access your book though it wasn't placed in the world of Skyrim you can either load any save or go to the test cell by opening the console. To open the console press the key that is just under the ESC key top left of your keyboard. For some it might be the tilde key, for other it can be the ¬ key, depends on keyboard. Just press keys until a grey layer appears down the screen, type coc QASmoke and press enter.

5. When the level is loaded open the console again and type Help "Name of your book" 4 to obtain its ID. Of course type the name of your book between the brackets.
When you have the ID, type player.additem 0200d67 1 (but replace 0200d67 by the ID you get). This will add the book to your inventory so you can read it and enjoy!

If the book appears correctly then you can place it in the world, add it to level lists etc.


Formating the text

To have your text nicely formated in your book, with the title on a first page, well centered, and the content coming on the next page, nicely as well, you have to use various tags that are quite similar to HTML formating. If you haven't any basic skills in web formating don't worry, it's really, really simple!

1. There is one first thing you should remember before starting to add any text in the input field:
Pay a great attention to apostrophs and brackets, it may sound stupid but the font used ingame is very strict on characters. Thus your apostrophs and brackets should be the default ones you get with US/UK qwerty keyboards. In fact avoid any special character in general and anything generated by alt-codes, no thin spaces or such formating.

• ['] and not [’] (the second one has a slight curve)
• [" "] and not [“ ”] (the second ones are slightly curved as well)
• [...] and not […] (the second one is only one character composed with the alt+0133 code in spite of 3 dots)

2. The following tags are the most useful ones that you likely will use in most of your books:

• [pagebreak] is obviously a page break. It should stand on an empty line, you can't put it at the end or beginning of a paragraph.
• <p align="center"> centers your text. It isn't really necessary to close the tag with a </p> but you can do it if you want. You can use other alignment values that are "left", "right" and "justify" as it seems, according to the CK wiki, that the "chaotic evil" alignment wasn't implemented.NOTE that this tag changes the paragraph! Paragraphs are seperated by the equivalent of skipping 3 lines. Just so you know.

3. The following tags will help you change the appearance of the text itself.

• <b></b> bolds the text placed between these tags.
• <i></i> italicizes the text placed between these tags.
• <font color="#FFFFFF"></color> changes the color of the font. Replace #FFFFFF by the hexadecimal value of the color of your choice. You can obtain this value on a web color index or in a CG software such as Photoshop in the color box.
• <font size="20"></font> changes the point size of the font. We haven't figured out yet if 20 is the default size but it seems credible.
• <font face='$HandwrittenFont'></font> changes the font (in handwritten font here). by default the font used is the one seen in the books so you should use this tag only if you want to switch to another font. The available fonts and their tags can be seen below.

$SkyrimBooks (or  $PrintedFont ) - $HandwrittenBold (or  $HandwrittenFont )

 $DaedricFont - $DragonFont (Upper case only)

$DwemerFont - $FalmerFont (Upper case only) 

4. The following tag allows you to insert images in your book.

• <img src='img://Textures/Interface/Books/Illuminated_Letters/A_letter.png'> inserts an illuminated letter's picture. You may need to insert size values in the tag after the path to the image. Just add  height='40' width='40' and replace the numbers by the right values. You can replace the A in A_letter.png by any other letter to get the one you want. If you insert this tag within a paragraph the text around should wrap around it. Click here more a tutorial teaching how to add your own images to a book.

Feedback:


If you have any comments/questions, or would like to request a tutorial, then please feel free to leave a comment. I will answer your question as quick as I can. If you request a tutorial, I'll let you know when/if you should expect your request to be fulfilled.