Believe it or not, this—and the web pages linked to it—were created entirely in Draw 8. It is a quirky, though surprisingly easy process… once you get the hang of it. One key area to experiment with, is the various white space settings found in Options/Publish to Internet. You can bring these up as you invoke the Publish to Internet command from the File menu.
When you choose to “Publish to Internet,” the default is to create web pages formatted as complex HTML tables. Paragraph text—such as the text you are reading— that has been set to be “HTML Compatible” will be formatted as text within the table. All other text will be converted to graphics, and placed in cells within the table. Graphics are placed into the table as well, and may be broken into several components spanning several cells.
Working with
Paragraph Text
Once
the HTML compatibility option is invoked, you no longer have access to
bullets or other formatting features for your text. You do have access
to standard HTML sizes, and you can retain your own typeface specifications.
Bear in mind, however, that your audience will only see that typeface if
they have it installed on their system. Otherwise, it will revert to their
default browser display font. You can allow all text to be converted
to graphics. This will retain all formatting, but for text-heavy pages
would may in very slow load times. Another option is to embed fonts
using TrueDoc technology. This holds promise, but at this time only
Netscape 4 supports it. As depicted on the next
page, you can also utilize multi-column paragraph frames. These can
get a bit tricky, so be careful. If the text doesn’t flow naturally—without
additional returns to force a column break— the Publish to HTML process
will turn it into a single-column format.
Page Setup
While
not strictly necessary, we found our results more predictable, by setting
up a custom page size that was 640 x 480 pixels with a resolution of 72
dpi. This gave us a pretty fair idea how things would fit for browsers
running at the lowest screen resolution. The HTML tables are constructed
to fit within a 640 pixel width, regardless of how you set up the Draw
page. (You can work from a standard letter size page and still get acceptable
results.) The length of the table will depend on tall your page is in Draw,
and the viewer’s browser settings. We could have set the height
for this page to be 1000 or more, if we knew that we had a lot of text
that needed to be placed on a single page. Generally, however, it is better
to limit the height to 480 pixels.
It is very easy to create a link between pages, like the one shown earlier or the one following this paragraph. You simply highlight the text, right click, and select an Internet Link to another page from the menu.