Text Box on Master Page not Displaying properly in IE8

[Hank]

I have a website that I created with Publisher 2003. One of my text boxes
located on the Master Page only displays on the Home Page when browsing with
Internet Explorer 8. On all other web pages it shows as a small box with an
“X†in it. When browsing with earlier versions of IE, the text box properly
displays on all web pages.

I’ve followed the advice on this forum and ungrouped all of my navigation
bars and other grouped objects to make it compatible with IE8. However the
text box in question is not grouped to anything.

If you’d like to see it first hand, my website address is:
www.PESsolutions.com
On the lower left hand corner of the Home Page you’ll see the text box
“Celebrating 18 Years of Success. 1991—2009â€. When you navigate to other
pages, it won’t be visible (assuming your browsing with IE 8).

Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

 

[DavidF]

Move all design elements off the Master Page onto the main publication page.
As a rule, don't use the Master Page with web publications.

DavidF

 

[Hank]

Thanks David for your reply.

I would hate to copy and position this text box (or any other design element
that's repeated on every page) on each page every time I update it. It does
get updated annually so I would have the hassle of repeating this each time.

I have my company Logo and Name (i.e. text box) at the top of my Master Page
and there's no problems with it displaying properly on each webpage when
viewing in IE8. I wonder why that works and the other one does not?

Does anyone else have a suggestion on how I can get this to display properly
when viewing in IE8?

Thanks

 

[DavidF]

Sorry, but the problem is not limited to just the text box or just to IE8.
The text box doesn't render correctly on your other pages in IE7, and the
banner, logo etc that you also have on the Master page do not render when
viewed with FireFox other than the home page. Yeah, I know it sucks, but you
just can't use the Master Page feature with Publisher web pages. Wish we
could...maybe in the next version.

It looks like that only the text box with the "celebrating 18 years of
success..." will be updated each year. The logo, banner and such are the
same. You should be able to go to the Master Page view, hold down the Ctrl
key and select the logo, banner and everything that is at the top of each
page, group those elements, copy...or actually try cutting them. Then switch
to regular view and just Ctrl + V. If you are lucky the group of elements
will paste in the same location on the main publication page. Then ungroup,
go to the next page and Ctrl + V and work your way through your publication.
At worse you may have to drag and nudge that group of elements to position
them correctly. Just remember to ungroup them on each page. In the future if
you want to add a page, just duplicate all items on a previous page.

Now as per the 'text box' that will need to be updated next year, it is
actually being converted to an image by Publisher when you produce your
pages: http://www.pessolutions.com/index_files/image620.gif This is normal
behavior when you use "fancy" borders around text boxes...Pub converts those
text boxes to images. So since this is what is happening anyway, you can
just import that image into each page and change the image next year with
updated information. You could even do this with the logo and banner images
if you wanted to.

First publish your web files to your computer where you can easily find
them. Go into the 'index_files' folder and find the 'image602.gif' file.
Copy it to a permanent folder somewhere on your hard drive after renaming
it, perhaps 'success.gif'. Create a folder on your web host at the same
directory level as the index_files folder and your index.htm file and call
it 'images'. Upload the 'success.gif' file to your new 'images' folder. Go
back to your Pub file and do a Insert > html code fragment and copy and
paste (Ctrl + V) the following code fragment into the fragment box:

<IMG SRC="http://www.pessolutions.com/images/success.gif" border="0"
width="155" height="99"></A>

Drag the old text box off the page into the scratch area and position your
new code fragment box where the text box was. Do a web page preview and you
will see that you will import that image into the page. Next year, just
update the old text box that you saved in the scratch area with the new
years, right click and save it as a gif file, name it 'success.gif' , upload
it to your 'images' folder on the server and replace the old 'success.gif'
and each page will autmomagically be updated with the new image with the new
dates and years.

And finally, consider compressing your images before you upload your new web
files. The pages will load more quickly and the images will look better in
FireFox.

Reference: Compress graphics file sizes to create smaller Publisher Web
pages (2003):
http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/publisher/HA011266301033.aspx

DavidF

 

[DavidF]

'Scuse me...I don't think you need the </A> in the code snippet. I think
that

<IMG SRC="http://www.pessolutions.com/images/success.gif" border="0"
width="155" height="99">

will work just fine.

DavidF

 

[Eric James]

The problem you have come across there is one of the many bugs in Publisher
which Microsoft could easily fix if they cared, but it seems they don't,
much.
You could fix it though by a bit of manual tweaking of the html files which
Publisher has produced. If you view the source code of the broken pages, you
may see several image links in the code which look like this:

file:///C:\Documents%20and%20Settings\Jeffrey%20Miller\My%20Documents\Old%20D%20Drive\Website%20Design\Publish%20to%20the%20Web\index_files\image6231.jpg

when in fact such a link should read:

/index_files/image6231.jpg

(i.e. refer to a file on the web server and not one on your local drive) You
may find that correcting these links using Notepad or whatever editor you
fancy will mend your pages - also compare the pages which don't work with
the one that does, and look at what image files are present in your
index_files directory, as there may be anomalies.
There are also free batch editing tools around which can perform the same
search & replace automatically on a set of files, which makes this sort of
thing much easier. Emurasoft's 'ReplaceInFiles' is often mentioned here, but
Ecosoft's 'Replace Text' (http://www.ecobyte.com/replacetext/) is far
superior and much more flexible.

A neater solution all round would of course be to use a more suitable tool
for making your web pages, such as Expression Web Designer or maybe Serif
WebPlus or Dreamweaver. Microsoft now appear to be selling an Expression Web
upgrade for around $100, and a trial version is available free.

 

[Eric James]

Actually instead of:
/index_files/image6231.jpg
I should have written:
index_files/image6231.jpg

....which is a relative link and should therefore be impervious to the actual
placement of your web pages.

 

[Hank]

I really appreciate your great suggestions. I will give it a try.

 

[Hank]

David,

Sounds good. I really appreciate your suggestions and will apply them.

Hank