I suspect it could be almost as hard to do in Freeway. The lack of user defined styles and my inability to select that text overlay item when I wanted to just made it a bit of a pain. If I were to do this in Freeway I think I’d set ups class style for each of the elements and apply those to the elements as I needed to style them.
You can select items in the Site panel!
You can but selecting the text in a div that you can’t click on in the design view is almost impossible. In Freeway you could select the item in the site panel and hit return or enter to drop into that box. from there you could select the text. We don’t have that in Xway at the moment as hitting return or enter simply tries to edit the item name in the site panel.
Rather than adding the positioning style as an extended item I tried changing the position property using the inspector. Unfortunately every time I changed the item from relative to absolute it would add a top:0 and left:0 style which prevented the vertical alignment code from working. If I stripped these values out they would come back each time I switched the positioning back again.
In Freeway you could select the item in the site panel and hit return or enter to drop into that box. from there you could select the text. We don’t have that in Xway
Select the item in the Site panel
Press Tab to switch out of the Site panel
Press Command-Return to edit text within the box
Rather than adding the positioning style as an extended item I tried changing the position property using the inspector. Unfortunately every time I changed the item from relative to absolute it would add a top:0 and left:0 style which prevented the vertical alignment code from working. If I stripped these values out they would come back each time I switched the positioning back again.
You don’t need to keep changing the position property, but the reason that Xway adds top and left offsets is because this allows you to drag the box after you’ve converted it.
You don’t need to keep changing the position property, but the reason that Xway adds top and left offsets is because this allows you to drag the box after you’ve converted it.
Freeway doesn’t allow you to remove offsets from absolute positioned items. The fact that you can remove them in Xway is another feature that Freeway doesn’t have. Boxes that don’t have offsets are positioned according to where they are in the content (text) flow. This is sometimes useful.
Also: Freeway doesn’t allow you to convert absolute-positioned boxes (layers) into relative-positioned boxes (inflow items) or vice versa.
You don’t need to keep changing the position property,…
Well you do if you can’t get to the text unless you know about the procedure above.
It’s not a difficult procedure:
Command-Return does the same as Return in Freeway. (We wanted to keep Return for adding returns - new paragraphs - after a box.) So: same as Freeway but add Command.
Tab switches out of the Site panel. Tab is normal for switching between views (e.g. text fields).
(In your document you can also click directly on the text box, because it’s actually in front of the image.)
What we decided with Xway is that it should be possible to use arrow keys within the Site panel. You can’t do this in Freeway because the Site panel is always inactive (it never responds to key presses). Because Xway allows you to do this, we provided Tab as a keyboard shortcut for switching out of the Site panel. You can also click back in the Layout view, although this will change your selection if you click on a different item (we’re considering whether it should do this or whether a first click should simply switch back to the Layout view).