Max,
I remembered a similar post to yours, and after looking for it realized it
was a post from you:
Best Pictures 11/19/05. In that thread both David Bartosik and I attempted
to answer your questions about both the Alt Tag, and how to get the best
pictures to display on your site. Since then, and since answering this post,
I have done some testing, and have come up with a workaround for perhaps
both your issues.
From my testing I have found that the Alt Tag feature does work in Pub 2000,
but is broken for some reason in Pub 2003. On your site,
www.whitebay.co.nz
you can see that you have added the alt tags to your images as they load in
IE (plenty of time to see when you are using a dial up connection). However
after loading and on mouseover, the tags do not work. Also the images that
do load are a bit blurred and lacking in definition.
To get better images, and to get the alt tags to work in Pub 2003 requires a
bit of work and as David B. said, perhaps having the alt tags are really not
that important, so you might decide it isn't worth it. If you do, here is a
way.
Instead of embedding your images, you need to import then into your site
using the insert html code fragment feature. Here is an article by David
Bartosik that describes the process...just ignore the reference to Pub 2000.
http://www.publishermvps.com/Default.aspx?tabid=84
Here is an example of the code snippet you would insert into your Pub doc
for each image:
<IMG SRC="
http://www.whitebay.co.nz/images/yourimage.jpg" ALT="Whatever you
want the alt tag to say" border="0" width="120" height="60">
For this to work properly, I have assumed that you will create a folder on
your site called 'images'. You will optimize and size your images in your
image editing software before you upload them to your 'images' folder, and
change the width and height within the code snippet to the size of your
images. You will change 'yourimage.jpg' to whatever you name your image,
along with the extension. You will change the Alt text to whatever you want
to read on mouseover describing the image. As per the border, if you change
0 to 1, 2 etc, you do get a border, but I do not know enough about coding to
tell you how to apply a specific color to that border, so perhaps go to
www.htmlgoodies.com and learn it there...or accept what you get, or don't
use a border to keep this process as simple as possible. You'll also have to
play around with the size and placement of your code fragment box, and I
can't guarantee that you will get things to line up correctly. However, you
will get your alt tag to work, and you will probably get a better quality
representation of your original image than what you get through embedding
the image in the Pub page. And....be sure to try this on a test page before
you start changing your whole site. It works for me, but it might not work
for you....back up, back up, back up.
Please post back with your results. There was another post today asking
about alt tags, and perhaps your testing could help that poster, and I would
like the feedback. Thanks.
DavidF
