I have a particular Freeway page composed of multiple layers, each layer made visible by a Target Show/Hide Action triggered by a button (which in turn hides what had previously been visible).
My question is on editing. I can’t seem to edit the layers (each consisting mainly of a table or two with text) unless I have the Site panel in Page view, grab the particular item I want to edit (making sure it’s visible), and drag it to the bottom of the list, thereby making it the topmost item. If I don’t do the latter, even if the item I’m working on is the only visible one, I can’t work on it–any levels that are “higher” than it are selected as I try to click through, even if “Show” is unchecked.
Am I missing something? Is there a simple way to work between different layers on a single page without reordering them?
Am I missing something? Is there a simple way to work between different layers on a single page without reordering them?
I hope Keith doesn’t mind me borrowing his response out of context, but here it is:
" …if you’ve stacked items together. Rather than dragging your stack apart to select something lower down, hold down the Command (Apple) and Option (Alt) keys and click. Each successive click selects the next-lower item"
All right, but if I’m working on something, say, seven items deep, isn’t that a heck of a lot of clicking? Why can’t I select that item in the Site Panel/Page view (I have to anyway, in order to toggle Show status), then get right to work on that item? If I click that buried layer and Show it, I don’t see how I can start to work on it immediately.
If you select such a buried and hidden element in the Page view mode of the Site pane, then by pressing Return, you will temporarily bring that element to the front, activated for editing. Not sure how that will work with tables, but it works with regular HTML boxes.
Sometime around 5/9/08 (at 08:36 +0100) Paul Bradforth said:
You should be able to select them in the site panel, then hit Return
to ‘enter’ them for editing.
Exactly so. This works just as well for table objects as it does for
regular HTML items or graphic boxes.
(And although the Return and Enter keys shouldn’t be considered to be always interchangeable - they produce different signal codes and
can be used for different operations - both work identically here.)
Don’t have the Mac with Freeway in front of me at the moment, but Return hasn’t seemed to work for me, with a table-infested layer. I select the item and hit return and… nothing. if I type a few letters I don’t see any results.
Sometime around 5/9/08 (at 09:19 -0400) Scott said:
Don’t have the Mac with Freeway in front of me at the moment, but
Return hasn’t seemed to work for me, with a table-infested layer. I
select the item and hit return and… nothing.
Okay, slightly more in-depth info…
If you have a table object selected as an object, so you can see
the selection handles, I’m afraid you can’t get ‘into’ one of the
cells that way.
If you use the drill-down technique to click through to the table
then, as long as you don’t hit the table edge, you should find that
you end up with a cell selected - there will be a thick grey
selection indicator around the cell perimiter.
THEN you can hit the Return or Enter key to step ‘into’ it and type
your text content.
Once there, remember to use nothing by keyboard-driven editing
tricks. Select text with command-A, navigate with arrow keys, hold
down the Shift key while navigating to select text portions, and so
on. Any cursor click will put you back into normal object-working
mode.
Any use?
(Do try avoiding using tables for regular layout tasks, please. Once
you get used to making layouts by just arranging objects on the page
you will normally find this much easier and more flexible.)
Thanks for the replies. I think, for my purposes, moving the layers around will be the easiest method. I just checked; ten layers, so I think the drill-down technique would take a lot longer in this case, especially since I have to first go over the the Site panel and make the layer’s object(s) visible anyway–might as well just drag it to the bottom while I’m at it. I do wish there was some sort of modifier key one could hit while clicking to tell Freeway “stay in the currently selected layer” or something like that. Since each layer’s visibility is toggled as a result of a button-clicking Action, it doesn’t matter in what order they’re layered. I was just hoping for a quicker way to edit the tables in each layer.
The data involved is information that is inherently tabular in nature (rows and columns); I’d asked about this quite some time ago in the forums, and the consensus was that tables would be best.
On a side note, why do you drag objects to the BOTTOM of the list in the Site panel/Page view to bring them forward? That threw me when I first started using Freeway. My automatic assumption had been “top of list/top of layers” which was, of course, wrong.
Sometime around 5/9/08 (at 13:11 -0400) Scott said:
My automatic assumption had been “top of list/top of layers” which
was, of course, wrong.
That was my assumption too, ‘way back when’. There’s a logic to
either way, and the way Freeway works fits the idea of the page being
the back-most item and items ‘closest’ to it in the list are ‘further
back’ in the stacking order than those that aren’t.
Try to think it terms of front/back (as in the Item > Arrange
options) rather than top/bottom. It helps.
