Well hopefully we can cut through the jargon and the hype and get you back on
track with the application.
My suggestion to you first and foremost would be to go to the Softpress site
(http://www.softpress.com) and take a look at the links under the Support/
Learning Resources menu. I suspect you’ve already been here but incase you
haven’t you’ll find pretty much all of the official links to things like
manuals, tutorials, QuickTime guides etc. It is also worth taking a look at any
Freeway files you can get your hands on and pick them apart to see how they
work. You’ll find a few templates in the application itself and others on the
Softpress site at;
http://www.softpress.com/support/templates.php
OK back to the question in hand - backgrounds.
You can apply a background style to quite a few things in Freeway including html
boxes, tables, table cells and, obviously, pages themselves. A background for a
page, for example, can either be a flat color or an image (or a combination of
the two).
For flat color fills you are best to define these as simple html colors rather
than using images, which will still work, but take more time to download and
maintain.
To apply a simple flat color fill to your page (for example) try this;
- Make sure the Inspector palette is showing (Window menu/ Inspector)
- Click outside of the page area so that nothing on the page is selected (this
will ensure that the Inspector shows us the controls and options for the page
and not the selected item)
- In the Inspector palette click on the paintbrush icon (the second icon in the
mini-toolbar) to select the page appearance settings
- Under the Background section you’ll see a drop down list for color. Here you
can choose a color from the list of select ‘Other…’ to create a new one.
To add an image to the page background you can use the Image drop down menu in
the same section to select an image you want to apply to the page. One thing to
note is that in html background images will tile by default. That is, left alone
, they will repeat both across and down the page until they have filled the
available browser window. You can use Freeway to control this behavior and
specify if you want the image to repeat across the page, down the page, all
over the page or not repeat at all.
Let’s add an image to the page as an example.
1.In the Image pop-up menu in the Background section of the Inspector palette
choose Select…
2. Select an image that you have previously prepared. The image will need to be
‘web ready’ and in a format that can just be used without Freeway having to
convert the file first. That is to say it should be a GIF, JPG, or PNG
formatted file. When creating your background image if you know that you’ll
want it to repeat across the page, for example, you can take advantage of this
to make your image as tall as you like but only a few pixels wide. When applied
to the page the image will repeat across the width of the page and, if seamless,
will appear to look like one single image. Tricks like this help to keep the
final page size down and, in turn, speed up your site.
3. Once the image is selected you’ll notice two things. First the image is
displayed in Freeway’s design view and secondly three new controls have
appeared in the Inspector palette. These allow you to specify how the image
tiles and scrolls.
4. Using the combination of the Horizontal and Vertical menus you’ll see that
you have quite a lot of control as to where the image should be placed and how
it repeats (or not).
5. If you still have your background color showing then you’ll also notice that
where the image isn’t diplayed the background color shows through. This is
great if you just want your graphic to show up at the top of the browser as the
background color will fill the rest of the page regardless of how big it gets.
6. The Background Scrolls checkbox allows you to fix the background in place so
that it will look like the page content hovers above it. When the page is
scrolled any text or images in the page will scroll over a static background
image rather than scrolling with it.
7. Have an experiment with these controls and preview your page in a browser to
get a feel for how they function.
If this all seems like stuff you know already be sure to let me know and I’ll
move on a bit.
All the best,
Tim.
Quoting SkipII email@hidden:
My struggle starts with Freeway 5 itself – the marketing hype that it is
simple, drag-and-drop, etc. That has not been my experience.
–
Extend Freeway the way you want with FreewayActions.com
http://www.freewayactions.com
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