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The design theme for this website was the foundation wall which forms the page heading for the WebBook page, and recurs in the small graphics used in all of the menus. These were all prepared using
Adobe ImageStyler, as were all of the graphics for the International Design Sources website, my first venture into website design. I loved ImageStyler, and continue to use it on all of my website design projects. But I recently discovered another program,
Xara 3D, which makes childs's play of designing the animated page headings I have used to add some extra visual appeal. At $39, this one is a real steal. The sample at the end of this paragraph was created in less than two minutes, as were all the page headings it was used to design. The Xara folks also have a more elaborate program, CorelXara2, that I have just started to work with. It's a full-fledged illustration program, not as elaborate as Adobe Illustrator or Corel Draw, but with features targeted specifically toward website design work. I used it to create the Outer Space page heading, and will be using it more in the future.
For occasionally capturing screen images from other websites, I have been very happy with HiJaak Capture, which is part of HiJaak Pro, a venerable program I have been using since its first version, many years ago. It is also useful for converting between dozens of different graphics file formats. For cropping and resizing images, I used Adobe PhotoHouse extensively. From PhotoHouse, files progressed to Corel PhotoPaint, which has a nice function for reducing the size of JPEG files. Their 75% setting provides a good compromise between file size and image quality, and speeds up downloading time. | |
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I recently found a single program which accomplishes all the above functions except for screen capture, with a very convenient user interface. The program is called Net Graphics Optimizer 2. You can download a free trial version by clicking the image at the left. |
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| Most of the text editing and HTML coding for this website was done using my old reliable 1985 DOS text editor (BRIEF). It's a little long in the tooth now, but it can do a lot of nice things modern mouse-based WYSIWYG text editors are incapable of. I have been aware, of course, that there are dozens of HTML editors out there, and even knew the folks in Toronto who produced HotMetal, one of the more popular ones. When I recently decided Y2K is fast approaching and I needed to modernize a bit, I downloaded a trial version of
HTML Assistant Pro 97 and liked it well enough to buy it. I use it now strictly for editing the HTML code and debugging it. It has a number of other features I'll never use, but it's been easy to learn and use the features I need. These did not include maintaining my website by sending files back and forth to my website host, Affinity Hosting. For that function I have been very happy with the CuteFTP 3.0 program from GlobalSCAPE, a popular program that is unrivaled for ease of use. Note that I never considered any of the template-based programs such as Microsoft Front Page, which claim to let you produce web pages with no prior knowledge of HTML, but produce complex HTML code which is difficult to manipulate later by hand-coding.
Producing properly formatted text for the WebBook required a different approach. New developments such as Dynamic HTML and Cascading Style Sheets have improved upon HTML's heretofore limited formatting capabilities. But these approaches amount to sharing responsibility for formatting between the author and the reader. If the author wants to make sure that the user sees his document formatted exactly as he intended, more drastic measures are called for. My choice, and in my opinion the only choice with today's technology, was to require the reader to use the Adobe Acrobat Reader, which required me to use the Adobe Acrobat PDFWriter to prepare the PDF files required by the Reader. To prepare the fully formatted documents for processing by the PDFWriter, I used Microsoft Works, whose word processor is a stripped-down version of Microsoft Word. I like its Easy Formats tool, which keeps the most recently used formatting tags in a short menu for rapid access, while still allowing ready access to less commonly used tags from a longer menu. For several of the later chapters, I switched to Microsoft Word, even though it had no significant advantages over MS Works, at least for this project. For most other publishing projects, I have now switched to Adobe's new InDesign program, whose only real advantage for non-graphical documents like Foundations is that its line-breaking algorithm considers the appearance of the entire paragraph when deciding where to end each line of text. | |
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