Hi Richard,
Lots of questions and two threads starting. I will address the IE8 issues in
the other thread.
Richard, as per using Publisher to build your site we discussed a lot of
this in great detail before. At that time I did warn you that the bigger and
more complex the site, the harder it would be to maintain with Publisher,
and the more likely you would be better off using a different program. I
also suggested strongly that if you wanted to proceed that you should break
your site up and produce it with multiple Publisher files, using multiple
folders or subdirectories. At this point I am beginning to think that given
the direction you seem to be taking your site, you might be better off
developing your site with ASP.net or PHP...or some other server side
database program.
I see that you have tried to color code and organize your site using
multiple navbars, but to be honest the organization just seems too
complicated and confusing from the user view point, and I can't imagine
trying to keep it organized and managed from your view point. There is no
content on your site that you can't produce with Publisher, and with some
tweaking make all the pages cross browser compatible, but the navigation
system and the way you have things organized are too confusing for me and
are where you might be better off with a different program. I know you have
worked really hard on the navigation, but the overall structure of your site
still needs work in my opinion, and ultimately it may be that a server side
data base program might be a better way to manage it.
As per the cross browser issues. The most common errors I see with Pub 2003
and 2007:
Grouping - if you group a text box with hyperlinked text to any other design
element, Publisher will convert all those grouped elements into a combined
image for FireFox, which will kill the link. Make sure to ungroup everything
on all pages. Applying the Office 2007 SP2 does not fix this issue for
FireFox.
Fill colors and borders - Publisher converts gradient fill colors and fancy
borders to images much as it does for grouped elements. Use single color
fills and simply borders as a rule. If you want to use a gradient fill, then
put the fill in a second text box and layer it behind the text box without
the fill. You can use the same technique for fancy borders.
Test your pages in FF as you build them. Publish your web files to your
local computer and open the index_files folder and look at the files in
thumbnail view. You should be able to spot text boxes that have been
converted to images, and grouped elements converted to images. You can also
do a web page preview, left click, drag across text to try to select it...if
you can't, then it has been converted to an image.
The other major area of cross browser compatibility has to do with how
Publisher processes images. Under some circumstances Publisher produces
lower quality copies of images for FireFox and other non-IE browsers. Always
use the Compress pictures feature.
Reference: Compress graphics file sizes to create smaller Publisher Web
pages (2003):
http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/publisher/HA011266301033.aspx
Reference: Compress Pictures dialog box (2007):
http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/help/HA100363901033.aspx?pid=CL100605171033
This will resolve most of the image quality issues. The other part is how
Publisher makes a lower quality gif file of some word art and other
graphics. There are several workaround for this, but one quick fix that
takes care of most of the problems, you are already doing. Under tools >
Options > Web tab you can opt to "allow PNG...". When you choose this
option, Publisher produces PNG files for the word art, instead of GIF files
and in general the PNG files, albeit larger in file size, are better
quality. If you uncheck that option and produce your web files and preview
them in FF, you will see a number of lower quality gif files. For now your
best option is to just stay with the PNG file option.
I will stop at this point. If you fix all the grouping, border, and fill
color issues and still have a FF compatibility issue then post back and give
me a link to the page and the specifics of what is not working as intended,
then I can help you with that.
DavidF
).