Composer Tutorial
More about graphics - The Little Things
Composer TutorialMore about graphics - The Little Things |
|
|
|
In this tutorial, we are going to cover some more about graphics and the
options that appear in the Image Properties dialog box. You will see something
different happen with the same options that we used before.
You will need to have a test page set up like we did in the last tutorial. A couple of good sized paragraphs but without the images at the beginning. I am going to use the same book.gif that I used in the last tutorial. You can use that or one of your own. Use the link to go back to the previous tutorial for anything that is not clear. |
|
 |
|
|
Once you have your paragraphs in place, click to make your insertion point
somewhere in the middle of the second line of text. Make sure it's not
in the middle of a word but try and make it in the middle of a sentence
and not at the end of one. Once again, I have used the same paragraph over
and over to show you the options. My image will be placed in the exact
same position in each paragraph.
Add your graphic the same way you did in the previous tutorial, only this time change the options to reflect them in order. Do not use the default one first. Once again, below are your wrapping options that appear on the Image Properties dialog box. You will notice that the last 2 are also show here. Use all of these options. |
|||||||||||||||||||||
|
|||||||||||||||||||||
|
 |
|
As you can see, the screen shot at left is a cutout portion of the whole
web page. I placed the image in the same location in each paragraph. I
used the first 3 wrapping options in order, located in the Image Properties
dialog box.
Although each of these options placed the text in a slightly different location, the differences between these three are hardly noticeable. They don't really make that much difference to the look of the text. If you look back at the last tutorial, you will see that it doesn't make any difference if you use these 3 options at the beginning of a paragraph or in the middle. They all leave a big gap between the row they are used in and the next text line. I have never used these options because I don't like the way they align the text. I would image that these would be fine to use if you just had an image with only a word or two after it. Then these options might come in handy as to the placement of that text. |
|
|
The same holds true when using options 4 and 5. Although there is a slight
difference where the text lines up with the graphic, it almost remains
unnoticeable. The difference between these two options and the ones above
comes in to play where the next line of text is concerned. As you can see,
there are no gaps between the 2 lines. This makes either of these 2 options
preferable with this type of formatting.
If you look at the last tutorial, these 2 options also look better when applied to images at the beginning of a paragraph than the other 3. |
|
 |
|
| The last 2 options that I used are really the most useful wrapping options when adding graphics to a paragraph, I think. They have been much more useful to me than the other 5. As you can see, the words will actually wrap around the graphic. You can change this one considerably by moving it further into the paragraph, making it so that more than 1 line wraps at the top. Play around with these options as these are strictly a matter of preference. |
|
 |
|
 |
|
Going back to the same Image Properties dialog box, let's explore some
of the other features. On the third section of this box is where the Dimensions
option is located. All the defaults are zero when you first open it up.
When you insert a graphic, you will not need to tell Composer the size
of the image, it will add this information on it's own.
However, you can change the height and width of a graphic to make it appear smaller or larger than it actually is. This isn't usually a good idea however, as it tends to distort the graphic quite a bit. You can also add space around your graphic by using the option on the right side. These are fairly self explanatory. |
|
|
There is one more thing to cover on the Image Properties dialog box that
I use frequently. That is the button labeled Alt.Text/LowRes. Click on
this button and you will be presented with the Alternate Image Properties
dialog box.
Here is where you can add text to an image so that when people pass their mouse over it, words will also show in a little text box. To test this pass your mouse over the book image below here and you should see the words - Transparent Book Gif. This option can be used on any graphic image on a web page. Note - This feature will not be seen in some lower versions of Netscape. |
|
 |
 |
|
| In this tutorial, we learned more about the advanced formatting and wrapping features when using graphics in paragraphs. When to use which option and what they look like. We also learned about adding alternate text to graphics placed on web pages. Have you been using your View Source option to follow along and see what the html code is doing? The next tutorial will cover linking. |
|
| Move on to: How do I link? |
|
| Go back one page |
