I am trialling demo of Freeway Express and although finding the menu language not very intuitive I would go ahead with purchase if I could just get a basic website out of it. My problem is that I am trying to get text boxes and graphics boxes to sit together side by side and be the same height and even after wading through the manual and forum posts I cannot find an answer to the problem of how to do this. I am setting up a text box with text and then fitting a graphic box to the right of it so that it takes up the remaining space of the whole fixed width page and is the same height as the finished text box. I then import a photo from Mac Preview (the programme) cropped to the exact size of pixels for the graphic space. On “Page” view everything looks exactly right but as soon as I go to Express “Preview” view or “Browser” the graphic is of a different height to the text box (or vice versa?). This is no matter what settings I use for text box - flexible or minimum. I have tried fiddling with the width of the text box so that the constraints do not alter number of words per line between the Page/Preview views. I feel that Freeway ought to be able to do this as it is basic to the way a lot of websites look to me to be set up. As a complete beginner at this (but not to graphic layout programmes) I assume I must be misunderstanding some basic rule of setting up a website layout. Some pages turn out OK but I am wondering if that is just by luck and assume if I’m not getting the basics right things will only get worse once the site is subject to other browsers. I would really appreciate a short reply or a pointer to where I can sort this problem - everything else seems to work OK so far. Thanks.
You’re running into a common issue with Web sites in general. HTML text is not guaranteed to be exactly the same size in every browser, or to set at the same line-height, or even to get the same number of words to a line. That’s just a beginning.
Next, the individual user can easily adjust the font size to suit their own needs – bump up the body text to 24px to make it easier to read with aging eyes, for example. You don’t control the browser, and the sooner you figure that out and come to terms with it, the happier you will be.
It is always best to check your page in a number of different browsers, and if you have access to a PC, to a number of PC browsers as well. (I often justify a trip to the Best Buy for this very reason. It’s “research”!)
The best Web sites adapt gracefully to these changes because they have room to grow built in. You can very easily get the tops of your text and graphics to line up – that’s naturally easy in Freeway. But to get the bottoms to line up in more than one browser, you would need to freeze the text into a graphic, and that is an Extremely Bad Idea for any number of reasons.
Walter
On Mar 30, 2013, at 4:41 PM, John Richards wrote:
I am trialling demo of Freeway Express and although finding the menu language not very intuitive I would go ahead with purchase if I could just get a basic website out of it. My problem is that I am trying to get text boxes and graphics boxes to sit together side by side and be the same height
Thanks Walter. As I feared, the reason I could not find the answer was that the problem was just too basic! I knew that text would show up differently in different browsers but somehow was misled by the fact that inputting text in Freeway then results in a box with what looks to be a fixed size or a fixable size which on reflection is obviously not the case. Ah well, back to the drawing board…
John