Page Fillers

[GeorgeBell]

One of the somewhat frustrating issues in creating visually appealing print output, is obviously page layout, and often we find we have anything from say a quarter to a whole page which is blank.

A quite logical use of this blank space would be for example, to insert a range of relevant "Tips" which in turn would be designed to fill a specific depth/height.

There are # main wishes
1) A border and or background color to differentiate them from the normal text.
2) Be capable of appearing in the Index.
3) Easy to add, change or remove.

Any thoughts would be most appreciated.

[trent the thief]

I suggest using various snippets. You'd need to create a range of pertinent snippets in many sizes, though, and then manually place them as the occasion presents itself.

[GeorgeBell]

I did look at Snippets, but cannot seem to find a way of adding a border and background colour.

The equivalent for a Word user would be to draw a text box, fill its background with a colour, then add the text.

In Flare, this suggests I add a frame with a border to a page, and then add the snippet.

But trawling through Flare's Help, I cannot see any way of adding a frame to a page.

Am I missing something here?

[trent the thief]

Start by making a snippet, then open it up and create a div with the box styling you want. If I were doing that in word, I'd go with a single cell table and I'd probably do the same in Flare. I don't see a simple way, but there are some real css wizards here. And admittedly, I've not needed to do anything flashy until my latest project. The less you mess with the pages the better off you'll be, IMHO.

The longer you use Flare, the better you'll get at finding hack and workarounds. The GUI has improved steadily, but there are still things you just can do. I think it'd rock to have a div/box creator and to be able to really shift around or simply delete major div elements in the skin editor.

[GeorgeBell]

Thank you for such a quick reply. I think Terminology is one of the trickiest things I've had to deal with using Flare, is between word processing and desktop publishing

I searched Flare's Help for "create a div box", and not one of the 30 results had "div" in the Title. But lots had "text box".

I felt really stupid when I saw that I had somehow missed the "Text Box" icon in the "Insert" ribbon.

So thanks a million for pointing me in the right direction. I now have a bordered text box, working index entry and a snippet. I just need to do more reading to centre the box on the page, apply a background, then work out how to save a selection of pre-sized text boxes.

[trent the thief]

You'll end up bootstrapping yourself into a good working knowledge of CSS. Flare does a lot towards giving you a start, but you may need to do a bit of manual tweaking. Good luck with everything