Drop Down Menu tut from Xara Outsider

**Turan** · 01 April 2009, 01:08 PM

Can anyone explain how the drop down menu works on the Outsider tut. In particular how does the 'MouseOver Menu' layer work?

Logic would tell me that all highlights in this layer should show, but somehow they have managed to make one rectangle to appear at a time - the mosue over instrution to this layer only appears when my text cursor is on the space between 'xara' and 'xtreame' on the second line! But surly for each line you need a seperate layer and a mouse over instruction for each line of text. I like the tidyness of their way but how did they do it?

Turan

**covoxer** · 01 April 2009, 01:23 PM

Originally Posted by Turan

But surly for each line you need a seperate layer and a mouse over instruction for each line of text.

No. You need a separate layers for separate pop-ups. Rollover layers (those with names starting with 'mouseover' or 'mousedown') are different beasts. They never pop up entirely. Instead, they automatically reveal only objects that intersect with currently hovered link object (button or a text with link applied) on the main layer. There is default mouseover layer in all templates which work for rollover effect on the static layer objects. But every pop-up layer can also have a separate rollover layers (mouseover and mousedown), so that this effect works on links placed on the popup.
This all is documented in the manual.

**Turan** · 01 April 2009, 03:44 PM

Thanks for that - had to read it three of four times, but it makes sense now.

So if I was creating it from scratch (I know the tut says, copy and modifiy the given one, but I'm a software engineer) is there a particular place to link to the other layer? and must it have mouseover in the name?

When you say manual, I did not find it in the help section - do you mean the paper (or pdf version when you buy). I've only downloaded it to preview it, but I'll be buying it soon.

Excellent product.

Turan