Creating Rollover Buttons Almost any object you draw can be made into a rollover that reacts to cursor actions, so you can liven up your published document with simple animated effects and hyperlinks. Cursor actions are events such as when a user holds or passes a cursor over the object, or clicks the object by using a mouse. When you’re creating rollovers, three basic states can be defined: Normal, Over, and Down. The Normal state sets how an object appears in its “static” state—when the cursor is not over or clicked on the object on the web page. The Over state sets the appearance of the object whenever a cursor is over it. The Down state reveals the object in the rollover group when the user’s cursor is above the object and has clicked their mouse button. By varying what the graphic looks like in these states, you can create interesting visual effects and give your users meaningful feedback related to their cursor movement. This is fun stuff and deserves a tutorial. The following steps show how to make a region interactive when an object (or group of objects) is displayed on a web page. Although the button will react to cursor actions when you’ve completed the tutorial, the actions will not link to anything; linking a button is covered later in this chapter—let’s concentrate on the art for the button first. Let’s suppose you want a button that tells the visitor that something is for sale: a button with a $ symbol plays in several countries, or use a currency symbol of your preference in this example. To continue the concept here, the action a visitor would take would be to click to buy the item; therefore, when visitors hover their cursor over and/or click the button, the button should change to a different look. In this example the button will change its text from a $ symbol to an official-looking “SOLD” message. Yep, as ambitious as this might sound, all you need to do is to follow these steps… Creating Different Looks for Rollover States 1. Create a button object, make it as fancy as you like (Effects | Emboss works well), but keep the size of the button to approximately the size you’d want it on your web page—under an inch is fine for this example. Then with the Text tool, type $ and give the symbol a fill color that contrasts with the button color. 2. Select all the objects (CTRL+A), and then click the Create Rollover button on the toolbar to let CorelDRAW know this is going to be a rollover button once you’ve finished, as shown here. Ill 28-2 894 CorelDRAW X5 The Official Guide Several objects selected Less than 1" 3. With the object now defined as a rollover object, all the states on the Active Rollover State selector display the same group of objects you selected…and it’s time to create a change now. Click the Edit Rollover button to enter the editing state, as shown here, and then choose Over from the selector list. Ill 28-3 4. Edit your button; in the next illustration the embossed circle has actually been replaced with a polygon object. You can replace objects, change the fill, do just about anything you like because this editing state is not a “normal” page view in CorelDRAW’s drawing window. Some tricky stuff is going on behind the scenes, and if you choose to delete a shape and replace it now, you haven’t really deleted it. You remove an object from a state’s view, in this case from the Over state, but in the Normal state all your original objects are still there. Similarly, delete the $ and then with the Text tool, type SOLD in an interesting font. Ill 28-4 5. For the sake of testing all these features, let’s suppose that the Over state, the SOLD button, is also good for the Down state, the state that occurs when the visitor clicks the button. By default, the Normal state was assigned to all three available states when you first made the collection of objects a rollover button. First, click the Active Rollover State selector and choose Down; a view of the Normal state objects appears. 6. Trash the contents of the Down state by clicking the Deletes Rollover State trashcan button. 7. Choose Over from the selector, and then click the Duplicates State button. The Over state now duplicates the following unassigned state (Down). CHAPTER 28: Basic HTML Page Layout and Publishing 895 28 Choose state Replacement objects 8. Mission accomplished! Click the Finish Editing Rollover button (shown here), and save this file to CDR file format. Ill 28-5 9. Oh, yeah, you want to see your creation in action! CorelDRAW will preview your interactive button right on the drawing page. Click the Live Preview Of Rollovers button; before you move your cursor over the button, it should look like it did when you set it to Normal—your original group of objects. Move your cursor over the button, and it should show the Over state, as it will in the Down state (when you click the button) because you duplicated Over to Down in the tutorial. After previewing the effect, click the Live Preview Of Rollovers icon again to deactivate the live preview, because live drawings can get a little disconcerting. Look at rollover.cdr and take it apart to better see the wealth of creative possibilities in your own work. This setup has three different states, and when you click the button, it changes shape and sort of squishes away from you. Just about any edit you can perform on objects, including totally replacing them, can be used in a Rollover button. The Internet toolbar also has other rollover-related commands to objects, as follows: ● Edit Rollover This was covered earlier, but you should know that even after you think you’re finished, rollovers can be edited a week or a year from now. ● Extract All Objects From Rollover This is a destructive edit! Think about this command twice before you undo all your rollover work. Depending on the replacement objects you’ve built into a rollover, use this button to view and edit everything CorelDRAW has hidden while the document was a rollover. The objects will be stacked on top of each other, so you will have to change the stack order or drag them apart to see them. Rollover buttons can't be edited while the Live Preview Of Rollovers option is on. To edit any button, first disable this option by clicking the button. You can turn on Live Preview again when you finish editing the button. ● Duplicates State Covered briefly in the tutorial, this button is used to copy the Normal state to Over and Down states if you have deleted them using the command button, discussed next. 896 CorelDRAW X5 The Official Guide ● Deletes Rollover State This deserves a little more quality time: while editing any rollover state, you can delete the object(s) representing it by clicking this button. After a state has been deleted, there will be no object to represent it, so the rollover state will appear blank. If needed, use the Duplicates State button to create an exact copy of the Normal state back into a blank state to avoid the need to re-create the object(s) used for this state. If you’ve deleted a state, be sure to set the Active Rollover State list back to Normal, or your button will be blank during an action when it’s put up on a web page. You’ve just created a three-step rollover button! It is an interesting graphic effect, and sometimes you might want to use it just the way it is—a sort of graphic hide-and-seek game. Most of the time, however, you’ll want something additional to happen; you want the action of clicking the link to activate a hyperlink, and the user to be taken to the link’s destination. The destination can be a bookmark location on the current page, like the top or bottom of the page, or the destination might be another web page or URL location altogether. How to make the rollover or any other element do something is presented in the following section. Setting Internet Object Behavior While any individual object or rollover state is selected, you can set its behavior as a web object to either a URL or an Internet bookmark using options in the Behavior selector on the Internet toolbar, shown here. Ill 28-6 Adding URL Behavior You can apply hyperlinks to any object using this option. For example, Corel’s URL is http:// www.corel.com. Internet addresses must be preceded with the correct Internet protocol prefix (such as http://, https://, or ftp://). For example, if you’re linking to www.corel.com, the format must be http://www.corel.com. You can also use a “mailto” protocol to link to an email address, such as by entering mailto:someone@somewhere.com. This is a great way to get, for example, a potential client to write to you. By default, the http:// protocol is automatically added to precede your URL, but you can edit it as needed. To set a URL as the behavior for your web object, click to select the object, and use the Behavior selector on the Internet toolbar to specify the URL. With this option selected, type the actual URL in the Internet Address box, pressing ENTER to apply the address link. Once a CHAPTER 28: Basic HTML Page Layout and Publishing 897 28 URL has been applied, the Internet toolbar displays other options. Here are the URL-specific things you can define: ● Target Frame Use this option to specify an optional browser window location for the new page to open into. Unless you specify differently using this drop-down, the page that is called by the assigned URL address will open in the current browser window, replacing the page that contained the link. This produces the same results as the Default [None] setting in the Target Frame list. Choosing the _blank option from the list causes a new web browser window to open to display the linked page. If your web page uses frames for its display, you can specify where in the frameset the new content will open. Choosing _self opens the new URL to the same frame where the web object is located. The _top option opens the new URL in the full body of the window, and all frames are replaced with a single frame containing the new document. The _parent option opens the new document in the current frame’s Parent frameset. You can also enter custom frame names by typing them in the Target Frame combo box. Frame-based web pages cannot be searched by most search engines such as Google, and onscreen readers for the visually impaired cannot read the contents of frames. Think very carefully if you choose a frame-based web document, and consider the audience you might lose and annoy. ● ALT Comments This option is covered in more detail later in this chapter. Briefly, use the comments. If you don’t, your visitors who have graphics turned off in their browser won’t know what your message is. ● Hotspots A hotspot in a graphic can be a great way to create one graphic and yet tag several different areas to different links. Once you’ve entered a link for an object, click this icon to choose whether an object’s shape or its bounding box will define the clickable area. Choose either Object Shape or Bounding Box Of Object in the selector, as shown. You can choose the Cross-hatch and Background colors if the currently set colors are difficult to distinguish from other colors in your document. These don’t show on your published web page; they’re only a visual convenience while you work in CorelDRAW. Ill 28-7 898 CorelDRAW X5 The Official Guide ● Show Hotspot This option in the middle of the toolbar can be toggled on or off, and it can activate or deactivate the display of the crosshatch pattern, which indicates hotspots applied to web objects, shown here. Ill 28-8 Adding Bookmark Behavior Assigning a bookmark to a graphic object is a method you can use to provide a convenient way for users to navigate between web pages on your site. For example, you could use a bookmark if you wanted your audience to be able to click a button or other link and return to the first page of your site from another page in your site. This is a two-step process. In the first part of the process, you define a fixed location to which one or more URL links can point. The fixed location is an anchor or bookmarked object. The second step in the process would be to create a button or text link elsewhere that points to the object’s bookmark. Let’s walk through the process. Creating Bookmark Links 1. Select an object that you want to serve as the anchor or bookmark, for example, a graphic at the top of the page. The object that is bookmarked must be a graphic, not text. 2. From the Behavior drop-down list in the Internet toolbar choose Bookmark. 3. In the Internet Bookmark box enter a descriptive name for the bookmark, such as “home_page” or “page_4_bottom” and press ENTER, as shown in Figure 28-1. 4. Select another object or button or piece of paragraph text on the same page or on another page in your document. This is the object that when clicked will take your user to the object you previously bookmarked. 5. From the Behavior drop-down list in the Internet toolbar, choose Link. 6. From the Internet Address drop-down list, choose the Bookmark name you gave to the object in step 3. For example, if “Home page” was the bookmark name you used, you would see an entry like this: _PAGE1#Home page, as shown in Figure 28-2. CHAPTER 28: Basic HTML Page Layout and Publishing 899 28 900 CorelDRAW X5 The Official Guide FIGURE 28-1 A bookmark object can be on any page of a multi-page document you want to publish as a website. FIGURE 28-2 Use the target for the Bookmark you find on the Internet Address drop-down selector. You can also enter a fully qualified URL in the Internet Address field to link to the bookmark. The URL would take the form of the web page’s address, followed by a pound (#) sign and then the bookmark name. For example, a website’s home page is usually named index.html. So a bookmark named “picture” on the index.html page would be typed in as http://www.mysite/index.html#picture. If you are not familiar with how to write valid HTML hyperlinks and link anchor names or IDs (called bookmarks in CorelDRAW), consult your favorite HTML manual or the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) page on Links and Anchors at http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/struct/links.html#h-12.2.1. Web Properties and the Object Properties Docker You can use the Object Properties docker, shown in Figure 28-3, as an alternative to using the Internet toolbar. While you can apply many of the same settings from here, rollovers cannot be created from this docker. To open the Object Properties docker to display web object properties for a selected object, choose Window | Dockers | Properties, or more simply press ALT+ENTER. With the Object Properties docker open, click the Internet (globe icon) tab. CHAPTER 28: Basic HTML Page Layout and Publishing 901 28 FIGURE 28-3 The Object Properties docker provides an alternative way of applying common Internet properties to objects. Behavior Internet Address (URL) Target Frame ALT Comments Hotspot Shape Hotspot Options Using the Links and Bookmarks Docker Use the Links and Bookmarks docker to view, name, and apply preexisting bookmarks to objects. To open the docker, shown in Figure 28-4, choose Window | Dockers | Links and Bookmarks. Purely for convenience, this docker automatically lists the currently applied bookmarks and includes commands for linking, selecting, and deleting existing bookmark links. The bookmarks can be created only by using the Bookmarks option from the Behavior selector in the Internet toolbar. You will find this docker most useful if you are trying to find a particular bookmarked graphic in a multi-page document that contains a lot of bookmarked items. To find a bookmark in your document, open the Links and Bookmarks docker, and then double-click an entry in the Name column. You’re automatically taken to the page, and the bookmarked object is selected. To create a link to a bookmark, first select the object to which you want to link a bookmark, click the New Link button, and then type the name in the open field on the Name list. 902 CorelDRAW X5 The Official Guide FIGURE 28-4 The Links and Bookmarks docker provides a convenient way for you to manage bookmarks applied to objects. Refresh List New Link New Bookmark New Linked Image Delete Update Linked Image Open Link Break Link Applying a Page Background If the background of your web page design calls for something other than white, you’ll need to apply a unique background color or tiling background pattern. Page background is applied using the Page Setup pane of the Options dialog ( CTRL+J), shown in Figure 28-5. To access this dialog quickly, click to expand the listing under Document, and then click Background in the tree directory to view the available options. Although it might seem logical to create a separate background object for your page and to apply your background properties to it, this can cause problems when it comes time to export your page. The Background should be chosen in this dialog as No Background (the default), a Solid color, or a saved Bitmap. Choose Solid to access the color selector for choosing a uniform color. Choose Bitmap and click the Browse button to select a bitmap image as the tiling background. While Bitmap is selected and a bitmap file has been specified, the Source and Bitmap Size options in the dialog become available. The Source option lets you link to and embed the bitmap with your document, but it has no bearing on how exported web pages are created. The Bitmap Size options let you use either Default Size (the inherent size of the original bitmap) or a Custom Size as the size. By default, the Print And Export Background option is selected, which should remain so to be included as one of your web page elements. CHAPTER 28: Basic HTML Page Layout and Publishing 903 28 FIGURE 28-5 Use these options to apply color or tiling bitmap backgrounds to your web document pages. . select the object to which you want to link a bookmark, click the New Link button, and then type the name in the open field on the Name list. 902 CorelDRAW X5 The Official Guide FIGURE 28-4 The. shown here. Ill 28-2 894 CorelDRAW X5 The Official Guide Several objects selected Less than 1" 3. With the object now defined as a rollover object, all the states on the Active Rollover State. where in the frameset the new content will open. Choosing _self opens the new URL to the same frame where the web object is located. The _top option opens the new URL in the full body of the window,