Nav Bar Hyperlinks

[John G]

Using XP Pub 2003.

Just tried to create a new site with a nav bar on left.
When I add a page it adds to nav bar and also to list of pages at bottom
(Home|Project List|etc.).
It is possible to change the words on the left nav bar but not on the
bottom list.
The hyperlinks do not display on right click either at the left navbar
or at the bottom.
The words can not be changed at the bottom and there do not seem to be
any hperlinks because the bottom words do not link when clicked after
the site is saved and up loaded.
Just a test sight yet http://johngriff.com/tmp/index.htm
Wot am I missing?

 

[DavidF]

Hi John G,

I am not sure what you mean by "the hyperlinks do not display on right
click...", but I think I can help with the navbar.

If the navbars are produced by the navbar wizard, then they are tied
together. Make a change to one, and it is reflected in both. Your easiest
solution is to replace the wizard built horizontal navbar with a textual
navbar that you code yourself, and thereby can use what ever link words you
want. Reference: Code your own textual navigation menu in Publisher
http://msmvps.com/blogs/dbartosik/archive/2006/01/16/81255.aspx

The other advantage to this is the hand coded textual navbar will work in IE
and in FireFox, where usually the horizontal navbar produced by the wizard
does not.

Though you probably already know this from reading the newsgroup, I would
also suggest that you go to Tools > Options > Web Tab and uncheck "Rely on
VML..." and "Allow PNG...". This will give you faster loading pages.

And while you are there, look under Encoding, and tell me what the default
is set at?? I have messed with mine so many times that I don't remember what
the default was, and in some cases, changing this encoding can help make
Publisher sites more cross browser compatible.

One more tip... Right now you are linking to a photo album on another site,
and that is great. If however, you ever decide to post more images on your
Publisher site, then you should consider importing them, rather than
embedding them into the Pub doc. You will get faster loading, better quality
images...

DavidF

 

[John G]

David,
This is a learning exercise and an effort to make my rather scrappy site
better.
Thank you for your detailed efforts which I will try to respond to.

In more experimentation trying to answer each of your points I have
worked out enough to carry on and do what I want to do. I have answered
point by point below.

IMPORTANT This works all DIFFERENT in Pub 2002. Seems to work like I
expected??

Regards John G

Hi John G,

I am not sure what you mean by "the hyperlinks do not display on right
click...", but I think I can help with the navbar.

When editing the file, if you right click on the navbar or the bottom
line, the hyperlink function at the bottom of the drop box is greyed
out, but if you ungroup the bottom line (against the advice of a
message) then you can make changes to it and display its hyperrlink and
the changes are reflected in all the bottom lines..

Only those bottom lines that are ungrouped will generate links back to
the various pages for Firefox, but work OK for IE
As soon as another page is inserted all the bottom lines and infact all
the navbar elements are grouped as they were when the site is new.

If the navbars are produced by the navbar wizard, then they are tied
together. Make a change to one, and it is reflected in both. Your
easiest solution is to replace the wizard built horizontal navbar with
a textual navbar that you code yourself, and thereby can use what ever
link words you want. Reference: Code your own textual navigation menu
in Publisher

As I said before changes made to the navbar are not reflected in the
bottom line, only added pages appear but never change. Once ungrouped
changes made in one part of bottom line appear in all bottom lines.
But still there is no change of text in bottom line when change is made
in navbar.
This is a Pub thing not IE or FF. In fact a Pub 2003 and not Pub 2002.

http://msmvps.com/blogs/dbartosik/archive/2006/01/16/81255.aspx

The other advantage to this is the hand coded textual navbar will work
in IE and in FireFox, where usually the horizontal navbar produced by
the wizard does not.

Could easily hand code something but was trying to use the wizard as a
raw begginer would expect.
Have not tried horizontal navbar at all.

Though you probably already know this from reading the newsgroup, I
would also suggest that you go to Tools > Options > Web Tab and
uncheck "Rely on VML..." and "Allow PNG...". This will give you faster
loading pages.

Thats the way it is, VML and PNG are OFF

And while you are there, look under Encoding, and tell me what the
default is set at?? I have messed with mine so many times that I don't
remember what the default was, and in some cases, changing this
encoding can help make Publisher sites more cross browser compatible.

Encoding is set at Western European (Windows).

One more tip... Right now you are linking to a photo album on another
site, and that is great. If however, you ever decide to post more
images on your Publisher site, then you should consider importing
them, rather than embedding them into the Pub doc. You will get faster
loading, better quality images...

The real active site http://johngriff.com links to several Albums in
other directories on two sites and works just fine but I think I can
reduce the size of the thumbnails embeded in the publisher file to make
it a bit quicker.

 

[DavidF]

Hi John G,

Sorry it took me a while to get back to this.

First of all there were some changes made in the web building component of
Publisher between version 2002 and 2003. I have 97, 2000, 2003 and 2007, but
not 2002, so it is hard for me to comment on 2002. However, David Bartosik
has written a couple good articles about the differences that would be worth
reading: Web Publication Changes Made in Version 2002 of Publisher:
http://msmvps.com/blogs/dbartosik/archive/2006/01/03/81262.aspx
Publisher 2003 - What's new in web design for this version:
http://msmvps.com/blogs/dbartosik/pages/80555.aspx

What you will find in general is that 2003 is better than 2002 in almost
every way for web building, though it is still saddled with quite a few
limitations.

I think that what confused me was our terminology. When you say "bottom
line" for example, I now think you are talking about the horizontal textual
navbar that appears at the bottom of the page. When I suggested using the
hand coded textual navbar that is described in David Bartosik's article, I
was trying to say to use it instead of the "bottom line" navbar produced by
the navbar wizard.

When you say that when you right click either navbars and the hyperlink
option is grayed out, that is by design. If you insert a hyperlink into an
image or within a text box, the right click option to change the hyperlink
is available. However to change any of the properties of the wizard produced
navbars in 2003, you have to do that from within the wizard...you can't do
it manually. You can right click the navbar and get the option of "Wizard
for this object", or you can select the navbar and click on the little wand
that appears below the navbar. Either will open the Web site options to the
left of your page. You will see Change navigation bar...add, remove, and
reorder links... Click that and the Navigation Bar Properties dialog box
appears, and this is where you modify the links.

If you use the option of both the vertical and bottom navbar, then they are
tied together. Make a change in the hyperlink to one, and it is generally
reflected in the other. This is default behavior for wizard produced
navbars. The whole idea of using a wizard is to make a change on one page,
and automagically make the change throughout the document. With this
convenience, comes limitations, and thus your inability to get the
horizontal bottom navbar to be independent of the vertical navbar.

Now for some reason when you use both the vertical and the bottom navbar,
the bottom navbar does not work in FireFox. It appears that it is converted
into an image, which kills the hyperlinks. And given your goal to use
different words on the bottom and the vertical navbars, you can address both
issues with the workaround I suggested. No, you can't do it via the wizard.
You have to remove the bottom wizard built navbar, and insert the hand coded
one as described in David's article, via the insert html code fragment tool.
You can thus change the words to anything you want, and best of all the
inserted navbar will work in Firefox.

One caveat. Unless you specify a file name for your other pages, Pub 2003
will name them arbitrarily, and it is difficult to write absolute links. For
example if you go to your Travel Albums page, this is the link:
http://johngriff.com/index_files/page0001.htm
While you could use this as your absolute link, it is easier to keep
everything straight if you go to that page in your Publisher document, Tools

Web Page Options and under Publish to the Web, specify a file name. In

your case you might call that page "Talbums" or "Travel_Albums" or
"travelalbums"...or whatever works for you. Then when you do Publish to the
web, Publisher will produce a file called "travelalbums.htm" vs.
"page0001.htm", and the link to that page will be
http://johngriff.com/index_files/travelalbums.htm . And of course it is
under the Web Page Options that you change the Page Title...the words that
show in the navbar.

As to ungrouping and grouping the wizard built navbars in order to make
changes, I haven't really experimented with that. In general though I think
that when you ungroup, you also disconnect the navbar from the wizard, and
in general this won't work. If you find out otherwise, let me know.

I hope this rather lengthy explanation helps.

DavidF

 

[John G]

Thanks David,

File names and most other stuff is not a problem although I am always
learning.

I have got a working site now but Nav Bars creation is not as it seems,
see the bits in appropriate places below.

Please do not waste too much of your time on this as I have done what I
wanted but if you want to go on I am happy to help.
In fact since I wrote much of this msg I have reworked the whole thing
in Pub 2002 and it was much easier and about the same size.
Thanks again.
John G

Hi John G,

Sorry it took me a while to get back to this.

First of all there were some changes made in the web building
component of Publisher between version 2002 and 2003. I have 97, 2000,
2003 and 2007, but not 2002, so it is hard for me to comment on 2002.
However, David Bartosik has written a couple good articles about the
differences that would be worth reading: Web Publication Changes Made
in Version 2002 of Publisher:
http://msmvps.com/blogs/dbartosik/archive/2006/01/03/81262.aspx
Publisher 2003 - What's new in web design for this version:
http://msmvps.com/blogs/dbartosik/pages/80555.aspx

What you will find in general is that 2003 is better than 2002 in
almost every way for web building, though it is still saddled with
quite a few limitations.

I think that what confused me was our terminology. When you say
"bottom line" for example, I now think you are talking about the
horizontal textual navbar that appears at the bottom of the page. When
I suggested using the hand coded textual navbar that is described in
David Bartosik's article, I was trying to say to use it instead of the
"bottom line" navbar produced by the navbar wizard.

When you say that when you right click either navbars and the
hyperlink option is grayed out, that is by design. If you insert a
hyperlink into an image or within a text box, the right click option
to change the hyperlink is available. However to change any of the
properties of the wizard produced navbars in 2003, you have to do that
from within the wizard...you can't do it manually. You can right click
the navbar and get the option of "Wizard for this object", or you can
select the navbar and click on the little wand that appears below the
navbar. Either will open the Web site options to the left of your
page. You will see Change navigation bar...add, remove, and reorder
links... Click that and the Navigation Bar Properties dialog box
appears, and this is where you modify the links.

If you use the option of both the vertical and bottom navbar, then
they are tied together. Make a change in the hyperlink to one, and it
is generally reflected in the other.

No it is not as far as I can see, nothing short of ungrouping the bottom
navbar and changing their names manually ( usually to the sanme as the
main(vertical) bar works.

This Wizard works as advertised in PUB 2002 so I think I am doing the
correct things.

This is default behavior for wizard produced navbars. The whole idea of
using a wizard is to make a change on one page, and automagically make
the change throughout the document. With this convenience, comes
limitations, and thus your inability to get the horizontal bottom
navbar to be independent of the vertical navbar.

Yes I agree it is the idea but it does not work.
If you UNgroup the bottom bar and change the text it is properly
repeated to all the other BOTTOM bars but not to the vertical one????
Nor are changes in the vertical bar reflected to the bottom bar

Now for some reason when you use both the vertical and the bottom
navbar, the bottom navbar does not work in FireFox. It appears that it
is converted into an image, which kills the hyperlinks. And given your
goal to use different words on the bottom and the vertical navbars,
you can address both issues with the workaround I suggested. No, you
can't do it via the wizard. You have to remove the bottom wizard built
navbar, and insert the hand coded one as described in David's article,
via the insert html code fragment tool.

No I never wanted different words in the bottom I just wanted the
Vertical Bar words properly reflected in the bottom bar.
If you ungroup the bottom bar it is converted properly and works in
Firefox but still is never connected to the top bar which was my
original problem. Does not have this problem in Pub 2002.

You can thus change the words to anything you want, and best of all
the inserted navbar will work in Firefox.

One caveat. Unless you specify a file name for your other pages, Pub
2003 will name them arbitrarily, and it is difficult to write absolute
links. For example if you go to your Travel Albums page, this is the
link:
http://johngriff.com/index_files/page0001.htm

No those links generated by PUB are fine because the referenced pages
are part of the PUB generated site which is only realy an index to
absolute locations that are buried in the Pub pages and all work fine.

While you could use this as your absolute link, it is easier to keep
everything straight if you go to that page in your Publisher document,
Tools
your case you might call that page "Talbums" or "Travel_Albums" or
"travelalbums"...or whatever works for you. Then when you do Publish
to the web, Publisher will produce a file called "travelalbums.htm"
vs. "page0001.htm", and the link to that page will be
http://johngriff.com/index_files/travelalbums.htm . And of course it
is under the Web Page Options that you change the Page Title...the
words that show in the navbar.

As to ungrouping and grouping the wizard built navbars in order to
make changes, I haven't really experimented with that. In general
though I think that when you ungroup, you also disconnect the navbar
from the wizard, and in general this won't work. If you find out
otherwise, let me know.

Well as I said above the wizard does not seem to work when the bottom
bar is connected or not.

Regards
JohnG

 

[DavidF]

John G,

Ok...I won't pursue this. Bottom line is that when one uses the wizard to
automagically produce the navbars you get different results with the
different versions. As I don't have Pub 2002, I can't really test out what
you are doing.

Personally, I gave up on the navbar wizard built into Publisher because of
the limitations. In Pub 2000, it would only create 10 pages, as an example.
I actually use simple textual navbars or a javascript navbar that I import
to each page on my site, but that is beyond the scope of this thread, and is
beyond what most people should consider if they are using Publisher to build
their sites.

Nuff said...

DavidF