speech bubbles

[gpholman]

Web Speech Bubbles will natively shrink and grow according to what text is in them.

If I flip a bubble horizontally or vertically then the text box in them is lflipped as well - which is entirely as I'd expect. If I then select just the text box and flip it back to how I want it then the bubble looses its ability to resize with the text - i.e. the text will now 'spill' out of the bubble. Why is this and is it possible to re-orient the bubble without this side effect?

[gpholman]

I take it back! The bubble does resize once you actually type printable characters. Sorry, I assumed a problem as soon as I'd typed a carriage return and saw the cursor flashing outside the bubble.

I'll replace this question with 2 others about bubbles, if I may:

1) how do I increase/decrase their width without having the text resize as well?

2) How do I recolour them? These are complex object using various effects and dragging a colour over them just seems to trash 'em.

[bcire68]

I cannot test this from work, but this is what I think I would try if I were you. (This assumes that you are using XX5 or XXP5. If you are using XWD, ignore this post as it does not apply)

1) The text and the background (speach bubble) are probably either grouped or soft grouped. If this is the case, just clicking on the background and stretching it will cause all elements in the group to stretch as well. If you go to the objects gallery and drill down to just select the background and then stretch it, you should get the effect you want, though it might not lengthen the column of text inside it. The best way to do this is to just stetch the whole shape like you have been doing, and just reselect the text and apply a new font size to it.

2) Again go to the objects gallery and just select the background and then apply your color changes by clicking on the color you wish from the color bar.

I hope that helps.

Eric

[gpholman]

Hi Eric,

Thanks for the reply. Just realised that if you use the Text tool to stretch the text width line (not sure if this is the correct Xara terminology) then the speech bubble will increase in width automatically.

I'll try your suggestion for point 2 a bit later.

Thanks for the help!

[gpholman]

Further to point 1: increasing the text width also appears to make the top and bottom gaps around the text increase - which is not very desirable....

[bcire68]

Yes, if you just want to fit more text on the speach bubble, then stretching the text column would do exactly what you want.

That is interesting behaviour as I would have thought that the amount of speach bubble outside of the text would remain constant. It certianly does remain constant for buttons. Although now that I think about it, it depends on the minimum size that the speach bubble (as a stretchy panel background) was made with.

Eric