Yes, even in FW 5 you still have to use the Graphic Path tool to create lines. Indeed, many of use use such lines as dividers – dotted, light gray border applied. But the current functionality leaves much to be desired. My two big problems are:
Thin straight lines that sit atop a single large box are so difficult to select I just want to scream!
Despite FW’s Inspector telling you the border is 1px thick, it is not. Oh yes, if you zoom in, it looks like a 1px thickness, but when you Preview it is thicker. Shoot a screen shot in Preview and check the thickness by zooming within a graphics app. What Freeway tells you is 1px is in fact 2 pixels thick. Sometimes I want a true 1 pixel thick straight line in Freeway, but I have to use Photoshop to make it. It annoys me greatly, and would be nice if this were fixed in the future.
Thin straight lines that sit atop a single large box are so
difficult to select I just want to scream!
Unfortunately that is the nature of thin lines that sit on top of
other objects.
Despite FW’s Inspector telling you the border is 1px thick, it is not.
If you’re using a graphic object and giving it a border, is the
border set to be centered on the box edge? If so, there’s no way it
can show a single pixel with (or indeed any odd number width)
cleanly. The box edge is a zero-width thing that defines the boundary
between inside the box and outside. If you make a supposedly
one-pixel graphic straddle the boundary between two pixels, it has to
be drawn as an antialiased average across the two pixels.
Okay, this is why you may have a situation where Freeway can’t be
expected to draw a clean 1-pixel line. However, while checking this
before writing I have found that it will also produce a blurred line
in some cases with less reason. I just drew a box and found that a
1-pixel border was sometimes blurred and sometimes not, and sometimes
blurred for the horizontal sized but not the vertical.
Freeway still occasionally sets objects so they have sub-pixel
positioning - meaning that the dimension/location measurements may
show a number such as 100.5 rather than 100 or 101. Freeway’s rich
design model allows for this, but in pixel terms it doesn’t make a
lot of sense. Check your objects to see if this is the case.
Thin straight lines that sit atop a single large box are so
difficult to select I just want to scream!
Unfortunately that is the nature of thin lines that sit on top of
other objects.
As a user of Adobe Illustrator and drawer of thin lines atop other objects, I beg to disagree! It’s much easier to select those lines in other applications. It’s difficult in Freeway. And you know me, Keith. I am not a basher of Freeway. But I am vocal about what annoys me. This does.
Despite FW’s Inspector telling you the border is 1px thick, it is not.
If you’re using a graphic object and giving it a border, is the
border set to be centered on the box edge?
No, I sketched a line with the Graphic Path tool, then applied a dashed border to it in the Inspector, as shown here (the vertical dotted line between “TOPICS” and the Japanese text block at right): http://www.kiramek.com/test/index.html
The Inspector tells me that line is “1px” but you can clearly see it is not 1 pixel thick.
Sometime around 16/1/09 (at 04:23 -0500) JDW said:
The Inspector tells me that line is “1px” but you can clearly see it
is not 1 pixel thick.
Absolutely; I concur.
For the moment, I suggest using an HTML box with a border set on one
side only. Perhaps give the box that the text on the right is in some
large padding on the left and apply the border to that container?
Then it could even grow with the content.
Try drawing a 1px x whatever graphic box, giving it a fill, and
calling it a day. If you want a dashed line, draw an HTML box at any
height and width, and give it a 1px dashed HTML border on one side only.
There is no such thing (as far as I know) as a plain line tool in
Freeway. There is a path tool which can draw lines, but they still
need to be closed shapes, not discrete line segments as in Illustrator.
If you use Insert / Rule, you can put a horizontal rule into your HTML
as an inline object, but that’s an entirely different thing, and
requires a fair amount of fiddling to look like anything other than
thick and horsey and different in every browser.
Walter
On Jan 16, 2009, at 4:23 AM, JDW wrote:
No, I sketched a line with the Graphic Path tool, then applied a
dashed border to it in the Inspector, as shown here (the vertical
dotted line between “TOPICS” and the Japanese text block at right): Untitled
The Inspector tells me that line is “1px” but you can clearly see it
is not 1 pixel thick.
Sometime around 16/1/09 (at 09:07 -0500) Walter Lee Davis said:
There is a path tool which can draw lines, but they still need to be
closed shapes, not discrete line segments as in Illustrator.
Actually, if you double-click while drawing with that tool you finish
the line, whether it is closed or not. It still isn’t nearly as
sophisticated as Illustrator’s drawing tool, but there is more to it
than meets the eye.
Oh, I do know that pen tool – we go way back. But you see, that’s why you’re getting the doubled line. If you draw a line segment with the pen tool, then double-click, what you’re getting is a shape that is best described as a box of some width and no height. The double-click means “connect back to the origin to close the shape”, so your shape is two points: A and B, and two line segments: A-B and B-A. Each line segment gets a stroke, which could add up to two times whatever you put as your stroke width. If you set the stroke to middle, then your strokes will always be straddling the pixel grid (which gets messy, as you’ve seen).
This is why I always use a filled graphic box for this purpose, or sometimes an HTML box, if I need it to stretch. You will always get precisely 1px width or height if you set it that way in the Inspector, and it won’t blur at the edges.
But you see, that’s why you’re getting the doubled line.
Not me sir! I was just observing how graphic objects are rendered and
mentioning a fine point about how the line tool behaves. Which
reminds me…
The double-click means “connect back to the origin to close the
shape”, so your shape is two points: A and B, and two line segments:
A-B and B-A.
Actually, no! Try this: use the pen tool to draw an angle - two sides
of a triangle - double-clicking to finish drawing as you make the
second line. No line back to the start! You can give it a fill and
that will show the ‘end-to-beginning’ boundary, but if you now give
this graphic item a fat, visible stroke you’ll see it exists only
where you specifically drew it.
However, I agree that you’ll be guaranteed of the cleanest possible
line with today’s Freeway if you either fill a 1px-wide or tall,
borderless graphic box OR if you give an HTML box a border on one
side.
Keith, I certainly appreciate and will put to good use your “workarounds.” They are a bit counterintuitive insofar as you wouldn’t normally think to draw a 2D box to get a 1D line (I didn’t until I read your posts in this thread). So I hope that in future versions of FW the graphic path tool can be adjusted to make the 1px Inspector setting truly 1px thick.