Drop down menu - Questions

[RonM]

All:

I'm trying to learn and understand dropdown menus so I can build them without doing a lot research to refresh my memory each time I need one. So far, I understand a lot of the pieces: layers, objects, pages, etc. but I'm having trouble putting everything together. I know there are many posts relating to menus, buttons and navbars on the forum, but confusion abounds. Here are some questions I need help with.

Buttons
1. While disassembling a gallery button, and in spite of what XWD says about not hard grouping buttons or they won't work, Arrange > Remove Soft Group does not allow separation of individual parts. I must use the Ungroup option. Why?

When the button is ungrouped, the text changes colors, in this case white turns blue, and I haven't understood why nor found a way yet to change it back to white. (a) Why does it change colors? (b) Why does the right click > color editor have no effect? (c) What way do I hold my mouth to make it change or keep it from turning blue?

2. Using a gallery navbar, I created a series of submenu options beneath a button then moved the group to the appropriate layer. The resulting action when I changed layers caused the button text to change to the button color. Frustrated, I never found the right combination and permutations of tools to change it back. Why does it change?

3. Are there any significant differences between the Gallery buttons (meaning hidden features) and created-from-scratch buttons? I presume gallery buttons are created from bitmap graphics whereas scratch buttons are built using shaped objects tools in the program.

Colors
1. What relation is there between the square color button on the color line and layers, if any?

2. How do I change the button text only color? Button only color?

3. Most of the time, the dot on the square button appears to identify the color of the object but other times the dot is not there. Why? How can I identify the changeable color of the object?

4. Which action on the color bar button popup menu: Set Fill Color or Set Line Color changes the text color? Or does either?


Thanks,

Ron

[slavelle]

1. While disassembling a gallery button, and in spite of what XWD says about not hard grouping buttons or they won't work, Arrange > Remove Soft Group does not allow separation of individual parts. I must use the Ungroup option. Why?

When the button is ungrouped, the text changes colors, in this case white turns blue, and I haven't understood why nor found a way yet to change it back to white. (a) Why does it change colors? (b) Why does the right click > color editor have no effect? (c) What way do I hold my mouth to make it change or keep it from turning blue?

I don't really use the gallery buttons much so I don't know the anatomy very well (though they are typically made up of a lot of parts that are grouped, then softgrouped across layers.

As far as the text color, however, this is controlled through the web properties dialog. For each linked item you create, you can tell it to "use common website link colors" on the link tab or not. These colors are defined at the bottom of the "website" tab. If you just want text to change color on mouseover, set these colors to be right for your site and text that is linked and checked that way on the Link tab will follow those rules. This actually makes it really easy to create dropdown menus that look pretty traditional and also have next to nothing to download graphics-wise.

The resulting action when I changed layers caused the button text to change to the button color.

Mouseover layers are funny like that. They can't contain "real" text, only grouped (and exported as graphic) text. If all you are doing is highlighting text, you don't have to worry about this because of 1 above. If you are mousing over a whole button with text, then you need (at least on the mouseover layer) to group that text with the button or at least with itself so that xwd knows that you intend it to export as part of a graphic.

3. Are there any significant differences between the Gallery buttons (meaning hidden features) and created-from-scratch buttons? I presume gallery buttons are created from bitmap graphics whereas scratch buttons are built using shaped objects tools in the program.

No difference except that they are already created for you. I don't bother much with the softgrouping feature for my buttons because I don't really have a great handle on it and it makes things sometimes hard to get at, but the template buttons can be taken apart all the way down to the vector level if you want to edit them there.

Colors
1. What relation is there between the square color button on the color line and layers, if any?

2. How do I change the button text only color? Button only color?

3. Most of the time, the dot on the square button appears to identify the color of the object but other times the dot is not there. Why? How can I identify the changeable color of the object?

4. Which action on the color bar button popup menu: Set Fill Color or Set Line Color changes the text color? Or does either?

1. Square Color=named color. The diamonds are websafe, the small rounded squares are tints/shades of other colors.
2. You have to make sure that you are selecting the parts you mean to be. ctrl click will select stuff from within grouped objects. shift will add to the selection. So ctrl+shift will multi-select several objects from within a group, and so on.
4. When you have text selected, you likely want "change fill color", as line color will add an outline to your text. If you are going for a headline or logo or something, this would be useful, but a button label or regular text will probably be too small for this to be effective. You will also notice that text with an outline that is not grouped (and being forced to be a graphic instead of html text) will not show the outline.

hope that helps.

[bcire68]

I have to run to an appointment in a few minutes but I will attempt to answer some of your questions in the time that I have.

You DO want to hard group the button background with the button text but on a layer by layer basis. So you would group the background and text on the Mouse Off layer and seperately group the background and text on the Mouse Over layer. If you select the background and text on both layers at the same time and then group them....Then the button does not work.

Also when you ungroup the button and the text turns blue, it is because the text is just linked text now and not part of a graphic when it was grouped with the background. Once you have made your changes, regroup the button background and text (by layer as discussed above) and the text will go back to being white.

OK. I have to run. I hope that helps get you part way there.

Eric

[RonM]

Slavelle, bcire68

Thank you all for your response(s). They helped a great deal. I've learned a lot in just the last 2 hours.

It makes sense now that grouping the buttons on a button by button basis is okay but grouping the navbar makes one big button and it wouldn't know what do. Though they're helpful, it's too bad the movie didn't explain why.

It also makes sense now that if I want to change the text color of a button, I have to select it with the text tool first.

Again, much abliged for your help.

Ron