Hi

They say a picture paints a thousand words. Well XaraX is fundamental for our particular application.

I manage a web development team which maintains a 6000 plus page intranet site for a large UK bank. The information is technical and includes a fair amount of flow charts all created in XaraX. They are semi interactive, in that as the users hover their mouse over each box of the flow chart, a paragraph or so of text appears next to the cursor. Because our users have a variety of browsers, we create each flow image twice - once for 1024 resolution and the other for 800.

This is where XaraX's immage mapping is useful, we simply export the file (twice) in png format and enable image mapping from the options in the final dialog box. It gets better though, because one of our team has created a Java applet which takes the two XARAX generated HTM files, and creates a new one with all the coordinates in place for both resolutions, and the necessary Javascript to allow the browser to choose which image to display. It then creates all the mouseover files ready for adding the descriptive text.

So our largest image with over 100 boxes on it can be modified - generated and published with all the correct coordinates in minutes rather than in days, as used to be the case using more primative means.

Our users are then able to stay on one web page and fully follow a complicated process map with all the relevant descriptive text appearing as required.

Unfortunately I cannot forward an example due to sensitivity of the information, but I just wanted to add my two pence worth to this excellent forum.

We read about all the excellent graphical capabilities of this product, but there are also many features that just make it a one stop application.

I hope that this post has not been too boring, but I hope it may have generated some interest in the web authors who read this forum

Cheers

Colin