XARA WEB DESIGNER PREVIEW - TEXT HANDLING
One of the first things you will notice on the Infobar is a new icon. Click
this icon to create a duplicate page. This is useful for quickly creating a
master page and then making a duplicate of every object on that page.
Bars and the page banners can be added to a new page with one click. It is
in essence a one step Copy and Paste In Place.
Text Handling When you open the Fonts drop down list, the Web Safe fonts appear at the top of the list. Web Safe
Fonts are fonts that are installed on most computers and will appear the same in the visitor’s browser. The last fonts
you used, in my case Verdana and Trebuchet MS, are repeated at the top of the list for easy selection. Following this
list are all fonts installed on your computer. Because many of these fonts may not be installed on all computers it is
best not to use them unless you group the font with another object, such as a banner or button. In this case the
group is automatically converted to a bitmap.
As with Xara Xtreme 4, and Xara Xtreme Pro, when you scroll over the font names, the selected text changes to that
font. Another new time-saving feature is this. When you select a text size from the Size drop down list, the font
automatically changes to that size. In addition, and this was also introduced with Xtreme and Xtreme Pro 4 is the
Interactive Size slider (the arrow button just to the right of the size window. Unlike the Size settings, which are fixed
amounts, this slider allows you to change the size of the selected text in 1 pixel increments from 3pix to 43pix. I
would not advise using a font size smaller than 8pix for websites however. At least, not if you want the text to be
readable. This is 7 pixel text for example.
You can apply all the formatting to text that you can in Xtreme including tabs and indents, super and subscripts. You
can increase and decrease the line spacing and set the amount of space before and after paragraphs. But the kerning
and tracking adjustments are gone because this is not something you should be doing with web text.
You can apply Repelling Text around an object as with Xtreme 4.0 and Xtreme Pro 4.0. When you
publish your document the text will appear in the repelled mode. And yet the text remains as
HTML text and is not converted to a bitmap, which means that the content of the text is visible to
search engines. In addition, you can copy and past the text from your website into another
document and edit it if necessary.
Spell Checking
Xara Web Design has a powerful spell checking capability. You
can opt to check your spelling while you type and you can
check your spelling in a number of languages. Misspelled words
are indicated by a red underline. Right click on the underlined
text and select from the list of suggested spellings or if the
word is spelled correctly, but not in the dictionary, you can add it to
the dictionary.
You can also underline text if you wish.
© Gary Priester 2009
