Boards Generator Manual ARASAAC

“BOARDS GENERATOR” TOOL MANUAL

The tool “Boards Generator” aims at designing and elaborating communication

boards adapted to the users’ characteristics and needs. You can also generate other types of
materials based on boards which facilitate the work in this sphere: lottos, semantic fields, etc.

To start using this tool, click on the menu Online Tools in the Portal and then select
Boards Generator.

A new window will automatically appear on the foreground showing the different
configuration options you can use to customize your board.

In the section Template Settings, choose the number of Rows and Columns your
board will have, the possibility to insert a Heading, the basic format of the table and cells

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 Boards Generator Manual ARASAAC
Border. Once configured, click on Review Template and at the bottom you will visualize
the template you have designed.

As an example, we have designed a table with 2 rows and 5 columns with heading. For
the table and cells’ border, we use color blue and a solid border.

This is the framework of our future board which we can already visualize. It’s
advisable to try all variables until you get the desired result.

Then, go to General Configuration. This is a basic section for generating our board.

First, define paper Size and Orientation and the distance in cm of the different
Margins (as in any word processor).

Afterwards, you have to define one of the most important aspects in your future board:
Cell Height and Width. You can use automatic adjustment (in most cases) or you can
customize both measures, which will allow you to create totally customized boards or to
adapt your board to the template format used by different usual communicators in the field
of augmentative and alternative communication.

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 Boards Generator Manual ARASAAC
The last thing is to decide the Cells Configuration, where you can define the basic
format of the Text that will appear within, together with the background Color. In the
Image section you can select its Size.

Once you have defined the General Configuration and the Cells Configuration, click on
Apply settings to all cells.

Important: The changes done in these two sections won’t appear in the Previous Template below. To preview
them, click on the button Generate Board in .rtf.

When you have defined all these variables, go to Previous Template and start
selecting and placing the different pictograms that will compose your board in their
corresponding cells, although first you should familiarize with the general options with this
graphic.

If you observe each of the cells in detail, you will find different options to configure
them. At the top there are four icons: Attach Pictogram, Delete Pictogram, Copy
content of the cell to clipboard and Paste clipboard content to cell. These are obviously used
to add or delete pictograms in your cell, copy or paste cells’ content (image and text) to or
from the clipboard.

At this moment you should fill in the different cells with the pictograms you want to
use. For that purpose, click on the icon Add pictogram and the search menu will appear.
Write there the term you wish to add to your board.

Every time you look for a pictogram to be inserted in one of the cells, it will
automatically be assigned the name it has in the database. If you want to modify it, go to the
bottom text box and write the word or phrase which you consider closer to your interests.

When all the parameters have been defined, you will see a Previous Template of
your communication board. This is the one corresponding to our example:
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 Boards Generator Manual ARASAAC

Now, if you click on Generate Board in .rtf a new window will appear
under the name tablero_2x5.rtf (compatible format with Word), where you select Open
with.

Here is the final result of our board which, as it is compatible with any Word
processor, can be modified using the processor’s tools.

If, apart from ARASAAC pictograms and images, you want to use your own images in
the generator, you should use the “Upload files to my work folder” option. This button
will appear after you click on both “Generate previous template” and “Generate board in
RTF”.

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 Boards Generator Manual ARASAAC

Then a new window will appear where you should choose the image file to be
uploaded.

It’s also important that you read the indications:

“Apart from the pictograms and pictures ARASAAC offers, you can upload your own image
files to later on use them with our tools. The graphic files (jpg, png, gif) may be uploaded individually
or massively. For the massive upload of files, you have to compress the images in ZIP and upload the
file. The maximum size per file is 2MB. The files are stored in a temporary folder, which is deleted
when the browser session expires.”

Once we read the instructions, we’ll upload a photograph as an example. Click on

“Select file”

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 Boards Generator Manual ARASAAC
Choose the image from your hard disk and click on “Open”. When you return to the
previous window, click on “Upload file”.

Then, you will receive an information message saying whether the process has been
successful or any problem has arisen.

Click on “Close” button to return to your calendar generator. To insert any of the uploaded
images, follow the same procedure explained before and click on the “attach pictogram to
cell….” button.

Then the same window that appeared before will be shown. Click on “My selection/
work folder”.

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 Boards Generator Manual ARASAAC
There you will see the uploaded image. Click on it to have it attached to the cell you
want.

Author manual: Equipo ARASAAC License: CC (BY-NC-SA) -7-