Troubleshooting

Troubleshooting

When I draw vector curves, how come they still look like they're bitmap graphics?

You'll get the best curves in Fireworks if you use a Soft Rounded stroke (Basic, Soft Rounded). The Soft Rounded stroke adds more pixels to smooth the edge of a shape than does the anti-aliasing alone.

I set frame delay and looping settings on an animation I created in Fireworks. Will they be exported to Flash?

No. Frame delay and looping settings apply only if you are exporting your animation as an Animated GIF. These settings are discarded when you export to Flash SWF.

I keep trying to use the Smoothing optimization setting on a masked object, but it doesn't seem to be doing anything .

Certain optimization settings such as Smoothing can be used only outside a masked area. Anything inside the masked area is off limits. Redraw your mask so the area you want to optimize with Smoothing is outside the mask.

Best PracticesSaving and Versioning Your PNG Files

One of the most important practices that you can develop when creating graphics in Fireworks (or any other program for that matter) is the saving and versioning of your native files (the PNG files you want to go back and edit later). I speak from experience when I tell you that it is immensely frustrating to go back and edit a graphic that you created only to find that you never saved the PNG file. Remember that when you export a file to the GIF or JPEG, your ability to edit those graphics down the road is extremely limited. That's why saving the native PNG file is so important.

You might not save the PNG file for a number of reasons, ranging from computer crashes to just thinking that you'll never have a need for the file again. Trust me when I say that the 30 seconds you take to save files along the way and save when you are finished with them is well worth it.

Just as with any complex document, your Fireworks creations usually involve a lot of steps, and Fireworks stores only so many undo actions along the way. For this reason, as you work on a project, take advantage of the Save As command and save progressive versions of your work. That way, you can always revert back to a previous version if something should go wrong.

Then when the project is complete, and you have that final version and are asked whether you want to save the changes when you close Fireworks, choose to save them.

Chapter 6. Automating and Extending Fireworks

In this chapter

Automating Tasks 130

Creating Custom Commands with the History Panel 134

Extending Fireworks 135

Troubleshooting 137

Best PracticesKnowing When to Use Batch Processing 138

Although Macromedia has done an outstanding job of balancing Fireworks's powerful functionality with its easy-to-use interface, they also recognize that you might want to customize the way Fireworks works to meet your needs. In this chapter, we take a look at how you can use Fireworks to reduce your design time by making repetitive tasks a snap and enhancing the Fireworks interface.

The plain truth is that although a lot of graphic and web design is fun, some repetitive tasks can become mundane. A while back, I designed a website for a client who collected and sold stamps. At any given time, he had several thousand stamps in his collection and the vast majority of them were for sale. He contracted with me to create a website for him and to digitize all the stamps so his customers could view the stamp prior to purchasing it. In addition, he wanted to put a digital watermark on the image with his company logo, so that other philatelists (the fancy name for stamp collectors) wouldn't " borrow " his images for use on their sites. This meant that for each stamp, I would have to

• Scan the stamp.

• Add a digital watermark to the full image.

• Resize the stamp for display on the site.

• Create a thumbnail of the stamp.

For a single stamp, that process would take about 10 minutes to do, which doesn't sound like much until you start getting into the sheer size of the project. At 10 minutes each, 3,000 stamps would take 30,000 minutes or 50 hours. At $50/ hour , that's almost $2,500 dollarsa price that my client just wouldn't be able to stomach.

Luckily, automating the process in Fireworks helped me cut the time required to complete the entire process of digitizing the images to less than 15 hours.