More On Colour

Continued from the feature Colour Me Happy!

Web Safe Colours

There are 216 colours that all operating systems use and are thereby ‘safe’ to apply on the web, along with an additional 40 colours that are rendered more or less consistently on all platforms. These are the 256 colours that make up the web safe palettes found in most graphic applications. They are good for use on graphic objects with solid fills, such as text decoration and the like. That’s about it.

Use Them Wisely

Use background colour to anti-alias text perfectly! This is a common problem: you create a bit of graphic text in Freeway and place it on a backdrop that has a defined colour (other than white or black). You probably leave the output setting of the text at the default. When you preview or publish the page, you will often see that the graphic text gets jagged or ‘fuzzy’ edges. A simple way to fix this is to modify the output settings in the Inspector. Select the graphic text item and click the Export tab in the inspector. The output type will be GIF, which is fine so leave it at that. We will change the colour setting though, which is probably at 256 colours. Depending on the text colour, this value should be somewhere between 4–16 colours. If you’re using primary colours (black, white, blue, red, green etc) you could technically set the value to 1 or 2 but this will produce very flat, harsh looking text graphic. A slightly wider range will produce better looking graphics while tightening the edges (removing the fuzziness). You should also check the anti-alias setting. One option is to set the anti-alias colour to the same as your backdrop. Another way is to simply fill the container box with the same colour as the backdrop. This will take care of any anti-aliasing problems. Experiment a bit to find the best output setting for your environment.

Colour your links! It’s a simple thing, to change colour for text links (html text) in Freeway. With nothing selected, click on the Inspector’s left tab and use the top three dropdown lists to select colours for the normal, visited and hover states. With Freeway Pro you get more options: you can create specific text styles in the Styles palette for your different link states and then select the appropriate style in the lower half of the Links tab in the Inspector. Remember to name your text styles clearly when you create them! It makes it much easier to find them later and remember what they’re used for.

This of course only modifies the default link style, it doesn’t allow you to set many link styles on the same page. Luckily there’s an action that does this. The downside is that the action can only be used with Freeway Pro. If you have Pro, then visit the Softpress Knowledgebase Actions library and locate the Link Color 1.0 action. With this action, you can use multiple link styles on one single page.

So if you have Express, you’re stuck with one link style? Unfortunately yes, if you don’t want to write any style code by hand you are. If you are prepared to write some code, there are ways to do this. We will discuss how in the Driven By Standards series, shortly.