How to read this Manual

1st March 2018
The AMBIT and other wiki manuals from the Anna Freud Centre are undergoing a major upgrade (early 2018) - consequently, this material will be becoming outdated, but will be updated as soon as the final designs and functions are in place. Bear with us!

It is worth spending a little time to familiarise yourself with this material.

Video tour


Video tour of the AMBIT manual gives you a quick look around the main features of the manual.

Beginners will particularly want to check they understand the Sidebar, how to use Links, and to open and close pages in this TiddlyManual, and how to use the various Menus that are available.

Links don't open pages?!


You will notice that if you click a link the page you are after doesn't automatically open straight away: instead the link appears to fly off towards the sidebar, and nothing else much happens:
Grrrrrr! Where's my page?!
This is the most obvious difference between a TiddlyManual and a conventional website. Your page HAS opened, but it hasn't immediately flipped you out of the page you are reading - instead it has joined an orderly queue - your 'reading list', if you like, or your Chapter-for-today...
So where IS it?!
The link you clicked actually has already opened on your Desktop, but it has opened at the bottom of the list of pages that you have opened so far... If you scroll down to the bottom of this page you'll find it there waiting for you, or if you click its title in the 'Currently Open' list in the Sidebar, you'll jump straight there.
What is the POINT of that?! It's irritating!
We found that people reported getting less sense out of what they were reading if clicking a link immediately "threw" them out of the page they were reading and onto a completely new page...

Arranging things the way we have means that you can focus on what you are currently reading, and simply 'line up' what you want further detail on for later... It is as though you generate the chapter you are interested in reading as you go.

You can jump direct from page to page in 'your' individually-selected chapter by clicking the links to pages in your Currently Open list. It takes a bit of getting used to but we hope that once you have got used to it, you actually find the reading experience less 'dizzying', and that it is easier to absorb material.

Show me round!


Have a quick look at the screen you are faced with. There are three main bits - the Title bar at the top, the Sidebar, and the main area, the Desktop. It is worth spending a little time to understand how these work if you plan to spend any time referring to tiddlymanuals.

To the LEFT: the Sidebar

The Sidebar is the right hand border of your screen, it is there to help you Find your way around, and share useful material that you find in the manual. working down from the top, you will find:

The Desktop

The Desktop is the main space on your screen - where you open Tiddlers, the 'pages' within this document. It behaves in ways that are worth understanding.

TOP: the Top Menu bar


The Top menu bar offers extra Menus for functions that are mostly for more advanced users, for instance if you want to Download a copy! or to Switch the "status" of tiddlers from Private to Public, or vice versa