Text box tyranny

[Soporose]

I'm going bonkers trying to figure out what rules/conditions govern the behavior of text in text boxes in XXP4 (developing a Web site). For example:

• The webpage is sized to 800 x 600.
  
• I place a text box on the page so the right-hand side stops about 20 pixels short of the page edge.
  
• I drop some text into the text box, have tried alignment at both centered and left justified, size it at say 20 pixels, and it wraps to two lines. The text box is deep enough to allow a couple more lines of text if needed.

In Xara it looks fine, but in both Firefox2 and IE7 the last word in the first line is truncated AT THE PAGE EDGE -- not at the position where we text box ends.

In other words the boundaries of the text box aren't honored and the text does not wrap.

The only way I can make it look right is to considerably reduce the font size to smaller than what I want it to be. Or I could insert hard line breaks, but that introduces its own pitfalls.

Grouping the text so it's exported as an image isn't an acceptable solution because I need that text to be read by search engine bots.

Any suggestions most welcome ?

[steve.ledger]

[1] Are you drawing 'text areas' before entering your text?
[2] Are you using whole pixels or points for your text sizes?

[David O'Neil]

I'd strongly recommend only using Xtreme to prototype a website. Hand code it after you have the design, especially for a professional site as you appear to be creating. Otherwise, due to the way Xtreme codes the pages, anyone who visits your site that doesn't use the Windows default 96 ppi scheme will see something much different than what you designed. Also, if the user has changed their text size in FF2 and equivalent browsers (or older ones), they won't see it the way you think they will.

If you read around, you will see some that say that FF3 will correctly scale Xtreme's pages, but having just downloaded and installed the latest release candidate, I can say with certainty that it doesn't handle Xtreme's pages correctly on a Windows box with 120 ppi display settings. Xtreme is only useful to me as a prototyping tool.

[steve.ledger]

Yes you're right David, Xtreme4 exported pages are malformed under those conditions. However browser 'Zooming' and the non-zoomed appearance under a users custom screen scaling (120dpi in your case) are not quite the same thing would you agree?
Although it's certainly true that other sites are fine at 120 dpi, so there's obviously a way to ensure conformity.

Maybe John (Covoxer) will comment?

[David O'Neil]

...However browser 'Zooming' and the non-zoomed appearance under a users custom screen scaling (120dpi in your case) are not quite the same thing would you agree?

What in my post made you think that I equated them?

...so there's obviously a way to ensure conformity...

For starters, don't use absolute positioning for everything. That can't be performed in Xara. The developers have almost done the best they can, though, given the limitations of HTML. I like it as a prototyping tool.

[steve.ledger]

What in my post made you think that I equated them?

Ah - you said:

"If you read around, you will see some that say that FF3 will correctly scale Xtreme's pages"

And having been part of some threads where ctlr+Mouse-wheel zooming was discussed (and where FF3 is known to enlarge all page objects rather than just the text as FF2 does) I thought you might have been referring to this.

My mistake.

[Charles Moir]

The heading text appears to be squashed in Xara (or perhaps it's tracking) - i.e. you've altered the aspect ratio. Web Browsers do not support that and so it's appearing in the normal aspect ratio in the browser. Remove all aspect ratio, kerning and tracking, and then it should be pretty accurate.

[covoxer]

Although it's certainly true that other sites are fine at 120 dpi, so there's obviously a way to ensure conformity.
Maybe John (Covoxer) will comment?

As long as you use pixel sizes for your fonts, no system resolution setting can influence the appearance of the page. Please report if does. We don't expect it to.
Thank you.

[Soporose]

The heading text appears to be squashed in Xara (or perhaps it's tracking) - i.e. you've altered the aspect ratio. Web Browsers do not support that and so it's appearing in the normal aspect ratio in the browser. Remove all aspect ratio, kerning and tracking, and then it should be pretty accurate.

Charles wins the porcelain doll!

Although I don't recall changing tracking or anything like that, I think I probably did resize the container (and therefore the contents) by pulling on the handles with the selected tool.

Solution: Cut the text to Notepad, delete the text box, create a new text box, copy text from Notepad, paste unformatted text.

Thank you Charles, and thanks also to everyone else for their input -- even comments that aren't spot-on this time provide valuable information.

[Soporose]

As long as you use pixel sizes for your fonts, no system resolution setting can influence the appearance of the page. Please report if does. We don't expect it to.
Thank you.

John, did you forget to add "..except in Firefox2", or am I missing your point?