Originally Posted by
gcellison
Thanks for the lesson, Acorn! It’s great advice to have more control over the look of the buttons and to maintain the vector quality on export.
A while back, I started making buttons in more or less the same way. I create the rectangle and text on mouseoff, change the shape as you do, then copy them to mouseover, making any desired changes to the appearance.
One thing I noticed is that if you do not deactivate “Underline text links” in the Website tab of Website Properties, a pesky line will show up under the text. You can’t get rid of it! (Sometimes assigning a CSS class specifying no text-decoration works, but sometimes it doesn't). Of course, you may want to have it activated for any links in the site’s text.
While not elegant, the workaround I found does the trick. I clone the rectangle on the mouseoff layer and put the clone directly in front of the text element. I set its transparency to 99.5%, which for Xara is completely invisible… yet it exports as code, not as an image. Finally, I assign the link to the transparent rectangle, rather than the soft group.
The result is that the mouseover functioning of the button still works, the link still works, but there’s no link underline.
(Just to mention: I generally don’t use softgroups. I imagine that if you included the transparent shape in a softgroup, the whole group would probably inherit the link property, so it might not help.)