Help from you Xara gurus please

[steve_asp]

Hi, I have joined the forum and it looks good, plenty of answers and interesting bits and pieces.

Sorry if this is an old question but I have had a look around and did not find anything really that good on this subject.

I am a professional web developer and I have been trying to do something for a while, well thats not quiet true I have achieved this but I cannot believe its as complex as it appears to be. I want to create CSS Sprite pages, I have looked at the graphic library with its buttons and to be honest they are great but I cannot get over how you can split the mouse over images from the static none roll over images within the layers section.

God knows why I find this hard but I do, you guys must be doing this process all the time but I just cannot do it easily and tips on how to do this effectively would be great and much appreciated.

Just finally can I set a snap grid with a width and height so for example I want a grid of width 100 and height say 35? again to aid in me creating CSS Sprite pages.

Again thanks alot and I hope this is in the right section, Steve.

[gwpriester]

Welcome to TalkGraphics Steve

Can you give me a link to a CSS Sprite page? Or explain what the benefit of this is?

Buttons are "soft grouped" which allows them to be edited across layers. So if you have a button that has the text About Us, and your partner splits and you want to change the text to About Me, then you can highlight the text, make the change, and the change is made on both buttons.

You can edit individual button states by making that layer visible and the other layer invisible and or locked.

If you are referring to a Navigation Bar, then this is different. You have to ungroup the bar for editing (the option is in the Navigation Bar Properties dialog). Delete all but one button, edit that button as desired then create a new navigation bar.

[steve_asp]

Thanks for getting back!
Yes sorry the aim of what I am doing is to create nav bars or whatever within a website using CSS & HTML. I create webpages using ASP.NET, I need to create everything I use from scratch, the pages are for commercial use.

I just thought that it would be simple to split the roll over and the static images but it seems like it is difficult. Do you have any other ideas about creating a sheet that I can use to create CSS sprites? I have read the help within the product and their is plenty of it but I feel its not the easiest to follow sometimes and the info around grids and snapping is a little flimsy.

Thanks in advance!

[pauland]

Personally, to create graphics for use with CSS, I would just create them using the design capabilities and forget about the web design capability of Xara software. If you look under Utilities->Options where you will find a Grid and Ruler tab. You can then set up grids and snapping.

You might also wish to use the ruler (Ctrl-L) and guidelines.

Gary, I think Steve is just creating graphic images that will be used with CSS rules to provide rollover and other effects (by swapping images using CSS).