Slicing an Image

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The final goal of all your work on the home page you've been creating is to export the page as HTML, which you will do in Lesson 8. Your page currently consists of four buttons and several graphic elements the logo, some text, a picture, and so on. If you exported the page now, you would get several large images along with the buttons. To see what that means, look at your home page. Click Show Slices and Hotspots on the Tools panel if you don't see the slices on the buttons. If you don't see the slice guides for your buttons, choose View > Slice Guides.

The red guides indicate the areas that will be sliced or cut when you export the page. Imagine using a ruler and a knife and cutting the canvas using the red lines as your guides. The resulting pieces would be the images you would get when you exported the page. Some of the images are large and could take longer to download. What you want to do is to create smaller slices that logically divide your page.

When you slice the canvas, not only are you dividing the image into smaller pieces, you are also defining the HTML table that will be created. An HTML table is a series of rows and columns in which you can place text or graphics. Tables are a way to control the look of your page. The rows and columns in the table can be of any height and width, and you can have columns or rows that expand over other columns or rows on the page.

There are several advantages to slicing an image. For example, if you will be updating a section of a graphic often, if you use slicing you will have to redo just that one piece of the graphic. In addition, each slice can be optimized differently for better overall results: For part of the image, JPEG may be the best choice for exporting, and for another part, GIF may be the best choice.

Slicing also is a way to add some interactivity to the page. The slices on your buttons were added automatically for you when you used the Button Editor. You could have added the rollovers manually though why would you want to when they are so easy to create in the Button Editor? However, there are other interactive elements such as disjointed rollovers and pop-up menus that you can add. You will create disjointed rollovers in this lesson and add pop-up menus in Lesson 10.

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    Macromedia Fireworks 8(c) Training from the Source
    Macromedia Fireworks 8: Training from the Source
    ISBN: 0321335910
    EAN: 2147483647
    Year: 2005
    Pages: 239
    Authors: Patti Schulze

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