OK guys, here is the (very comprehensive) response from Keith at SP.
Seems like the simplest thing to do would be to remove the options for GIF text in a HTML box, as clearly they will never work in the future, and haven’t worked at all in the past for perfectly logical reasons.
'Hi Iain
The Background and Overlay do indeed work, but both of them throw the text off the baseline used by the HTML text, so they can never made to line up without all sorts of testing over and over with various offsets to see if the HTML text can be made to match (but even that may vary from one browser to the next).
I have been working in Support for six years and have never been asked this question before, so although I can see that it is confusing for the effects to show when they won’t have any effect, it still comes down to how you will ever be able to use GIF text with effects in an HTML item because the effect cannot be made to extend beyond the boundaries of the HTML item.
Using GIF text inside a graphic item is very different because a graphic item is a completely different type of item than an HTML item.
If you image using an HTML item with a mix of HTML and GIF text on the same line as an inflow item, if the effect of the GIF text is set with a Shadow of, say, 75%, then the shadow will be outside the boundaries of the HTML item if that item is used as an inflow item inside the text. As you can see in the sample file I’ve sent, the HTML shadow can display outside the boundaries of the inflow item because it uses a CSS shadow – but GIF text with a graphic effect (which is exactly that – it’s a graphic effect generated by Freeway and output as a graphic item) applied cannot possibly show that effect outside of the item’s boundaries. Graphic effects on GIF text don’t use CSS, so even if they did work when GIF text was used inside an HTML item there would be a good chance that they would be clipped at the edge of the item inside which they are being used.
As I said, I can put a request in to see if it can be included one day. I can also log a bug to ask if all graphic effects can be switched off for GIF text inside an HTML item in the Freeway interface so there is less confusion.
Best regards
Keith Rigley
Support Technician, Softpress Systems’
freewaytalk mailing list
email@hidden
Update your subscriptions at:
http://freewaytalk.net/person/options