Packaging a Document or Scene

Find it: File > Package

Before you publish your documents or scenes on the Web, you need to package them using CosmoPackage. Packaging refers to the process of locating all the files necessary to create a document, scene, or world and organizing the files for publication on a server. Publishing refers to the process of copying the packaged files to a Web server where they can be accessed by Web clients.

Packaging accomplishes a number of things:

Note: Packaging is a one-way process. It strips authoring information and optimizes the files. Without this stripped information, you may not be able to edit embedded images and plug-in applications in an HTML file or animations in a VRML file. For this reason, if you want to continue to edit a file, work on the file you originally saved in Cosmo Create or Cosmo Worlds. Package the file again when you've finished editing it.

Major Stages

When you select File > Package, the CosmoPackage utility appears. The three buttons in the lower left corner allow you to step through each stage of the packaging process:

Discover
This stage finds all the local files needed to support your documents. All local URLs referred to in your file (for example, inlines, textures, sounds, and images) are located and included as part of the package for this file. Remote files and trusted references are ignored during this stage.

Package
This stage copies the files required for your package into a single staging directory. Absolute paths are changed to relative paths so that the world can be published on a Web server. During the packaging stage, CosmoPackage also optimizes VRML files and may rename them (for example, by adding a .gz or .wrl suffix). SGI-specific attributes are stripped from HTML files.

Preview
This stage allows you to view the packaged files so that you can test links, animations, sensors, scripts, navigation through VRML worlds, and layout of HTML pages.

Be sure to check the icon in the lower-right portion of the CosmoPackage window. If the package resembles an open box, packaging is still in progress (you're in the discovery or packaging stage). If the icon is a closed box with a tied ribbon, packaging is complete, and you have successfully completed both the discovery and packaging stages.

Note: Remember, just as with any document, you need to save the package in order for it to be recorded on disk.

CosmoPackage works with files in the following formats:

Other document types (such as .rgb and .gif image types, Java class files, and Shockwave plug-in files) are not searched for references to other local documents, they do not have their references corrected, nor are they optimized; they are just moved to the packaging directory.

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