Cannot get some buttons on drawing toolbar to be 'live'

[pinkpanther]

hello there,

On most of my toolbars, there are a lot of faded out buttons, text, etc.
But the one that is REALLY stopping me from doing what I want to do (... and
I don't like that!!!) are most of the icons on the 'drawing' toolbar. I
want to make a shadow around a cell and I have spent nearly 3 hours, reading
the instructions in the Help search section of fp, but nothing I do will make
them look 'live' (they are most of them faded out, but not all). The only
time they look alive is when I click tools - customise - commands - drawing -
etc. (roughly in that order) and then they come alive, but as soon as I stop
doing the process and close the dialoque and work boxes, they AGAIN become
faded.....!!!???

PLEASE can someone help???!!!

with best wishes and thank you's for a great solution in advance,

Miranda

 

[Ronx]

The tools on the drawing toolbar will only work with objects created with
the drawing toolbar (shape-art) - so you cannot create a shadow around a
cell.

The drawing toolbar generates VML graphics, which can only be seen in
Internet Explorer, or as poor quality .gif images in other browsers. Also,
most of these graphics are absolutely positioned, which will give you more
headaches if you are working in a table based layout (which it sounds like
you are).

See http://www.rxs-enterprises.org/tests/vml-graphics.htm for some reasons
why you should avoid VML.

 

[David Berry]

Go to Tools, Page Options, Authoring and make sure everything is checked and
the drop downs are set to custom. This will enable all features (some
aren't available based on the settings and browser version you choose).

Also, some settings will always be grayed out if it's not available for what
you're trying to do or if you haven't selected what you're working on.
Example, buttons on the image toolbar won't all work until you select the
image

 

[Mark Fitzpatrick]

Don't use the Drawing tools!!! They don't work cross-browser. They use
Vector Markup Language (VML) that is only supported in IE. In other browsers
they render horribly. FP disables these tools because they are not
compatible with other browsers. By default, FP sets it's compatibility to
show features only compatible with Internet Explorer and Netscape Navigator.
You can change this by going to Tools | Page Options | Compatibility (the
wording changes between versions but it's usually something similar) and
selecting a Custom browser and checking off thigns such as VML. You're best
off leaving these items alone though as, what usually happens, after you've
worked with these features for a while users will eventually comment that
the site looks horrible in another browser and there is no simple thing that
can be done to correct it short of removing every incompatible feature on
every page. That's a very, very time consuming process.

 

[pinkpanther]

well, thanks guys, for your great replies... and I've got the message not to
use fp shadow buttons etc!! but do any of you know how to get this shadow
effect on the page: http://www.killyourjob.com because that is what I
would like to achieve?

best wishes and many thanks again for your help,

Miranda

 

[David Berry]

The person who did this site created nested tables and then made graphics
with shadows and used them as background images in one of the tables. Do a
View Source on the page and copy and paste the code into FP Code View then
switch to Design View to see what they did.

If you're using FP2003 you can try the Layout Tables and Cells (under
tables) and add some effects to the cells