How to place a text box in front of an image

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NigelBennett
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How to place a text box in front of an image

Post by NigelBennett »

Hi. I want to float a gray, semi-transparent text box with white text in front of an image, as in the attached file. Any suggestions on what I need to do to achieve this will be gratefully received.
Thanks.
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Nigel
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Lydia
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Re: How to place a text box in front of an image

Post by Lydia »

Hi Nigel,
is this something you want to achieve in a page layout or in a topic?

regards,
Lydia.
Using Flare 10.2 and Flare 11 on Win 7
NigelBennett
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Re: How to place a text box in front of an image

Post by NigelBennett »

Hi Lydia,
I'm trying to do this in a topic. The marketing team have given me a "standard" jpg image to use for all my projects, and I need to insert the specific document title, ideally using variables so I can link the page into the various projects.
Nigel
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Lydia
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Re: How to place a text box in front of an image

Post by Lydia »

Hi Nigel,

I would use two divs. One with the image as background. And another one inside it with the text overlay.
Regarding the positioning and setting transparency, you can check out this post:
http://forums.madcapsoftware.com/viewto ... ity#p85545
which points you to the info on http://www.w3schools.com/css/css_image_transparency.asp.

I hope this will help to get you started.

Regards, Lydia.
Using Flare 10.2 and Flare 11 on Win 7
NigelBennett
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Re: How to place a text box in front of an image

Post by NigelBennett »

Hi Lydia
I've created two div classes; one for the image and one for the text box, and I now have the image on the page and the text in front of it. So far so good! But the text box is firmly fixed into the upper-left corner of the image and none of the style properties I change will move it down the page. Any suggestions? Also, where do I put the "opacity" code?
Nigel
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Nita Beck
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Re: How to place a text box in front of an image

Post by Nita Beck »

Why not do this using Capture? You can easily put a text box with no border and a transparent background anywhere over the photo, and you can use a variable from the project.
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NorthEast
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Re: How to place a text box in front of an image

Post by NorthEast »

NigelBennett wrote:Hi Lydia
I've created two div classes; one for the image and one for the text box, and I now have the image on the page and the text in front of it. So far so good! But the text box is firmly fixed into the upper-left corner of the image and none of the style properties I change will move it down the page. Any suggestions? Also, where do I put the "opacity" code?
There's probably two approaches to this.

a) If you need this to work in older browsers, set the opacity on the box you want to make semi-transparent.
But I'll give you a tip, if you put text inside that box, the text will also be semi-transparent - which you probably don't want.
So you'd keep the text outside of the box, and set its position property to move it over the box.
There's an example here: http://css-tricks.com/non-transparent-e ... -elements/

b) If you don't need to support older browser versions (IE8 and below), put the text inside the box and set the box to have a transparent background colour by setting it as a rgba colour. You don't need to set the opacity using this method, as the transparency only applies to the box's background colour and not its content.
NigelBennett
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Re: How to place a text box in front of an image

Post by NigelBennett »

Hi David
Thanks for the tips, but I need to know HOW to set the opacity of the box. I can't find any properties in the stylesheet to do that. And also, as I mentioned, the box is firmly glued into the upper-left corner of the image - it doesn't want to leave. How do I set the position of the box relative to the image?
Nigel
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Nita Beck
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Re: How to place a text box in front of an image

Post by Nita Beck »

Nigel, did you try my suggestion about using Capture? I think you'll find that it's very easy and it will solve your design issue.
Nita
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NorthEast
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Re: How to place a text box in front of an image

Post by NorthEast »

NigelBennett wrote:Hi David
Thanks for the tips, but I need to know HOW to set the opacity of the box. I can't find any properties in the stylesheet to do that. And also, as I mentioned, the box is firmly glued into the upper-left corner of the image - it doesn't want to leave. How do I set the position of the box relative to the image?
Edit the stylesheet in text mode, and add the opacity property.

Not every property is listed in Flare's simplified and advanced views, but it doesn't mean you can't use it.

To set object positions, I included some links above about the position property.
NigelBennett
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Re: How to place a text box in front of an image

Post by NigelBennett »

Hi Nita
Sorry, got a bit busy. Thanks for the tip, but we don't have Capture at the moment and the product release is this coming weekend. Things are therefore starting to get a bit hectic and I don't have time to get new stuff installed and running right now. I'll try to get the div thing working, otherwise I'll resort to creating separate jpgs for each manual and come back to this when things calm down a bit. :D
Nigel
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NigelBennett
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Re: How to place a text box in front of an image

Post by NigelBennett »

And my thanks to you David as well. I'll try this and see what happens. Otherwise, as I said to Nita, I'll resort to jpgs and re-visit this later when I have a bit more time to investigate.
Nigel
Confirmit, Oslo
NigelBennett
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Re: How to place a text box in front of an image

Post by NigelBennett »

Thanks Eldo, I'll try these examples an see if I can get them to work.
Nigel
Confirmit, Oslo
sdcinvan
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Re: How to place a text box in front of an image

Post by sdcinvan »

Nita Beck wrote:Nigel, did you try my suggestion about using Capture? I think you'll find that it's very easy and it will solve your design issue.
Hello Nita (et al)

I found this thread because I was looking for a way to graphically annotate some text (a programming script). In other words, I want to overlay graphics on the programming script. Correct me if I have mistaken but if I were to use MadCap Capture, I would have to turn the text into an image? If so, that would be unacceptable because of the loss of fidelity and the inability to search the script.

Thus far, I am been unable to position my image annotations over the text. What on each am I doing wrong? This is a very basic task, it shouldn't be this difficult. :(
Shawn in Vancouver, Canada
Main tools used: Flare 11.x, InDesign, Google Docs, Lectora, Captivate.
Report bugs: https://www.madcapsoftware.com/feedback/bugs.aspx ▪ Feature requests: https://www.madcapsoftware.com/feedback ... quest.aspx[/i]
Daniel Lemke
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Re: How to place a text box in front of an image

Post by Daniel Lemke »

I am trying to get the opacity to work in PDF output. Anybody have experience with this working or not working?

I have a decoration frame in my page layouts that contains a variable wrapped in a div.watermark. The idea being that if a PDF needs a watermark, someone could simply type the text into the variable in the target; if no watermark is needed, they simply leave the variable blank.

This works okay if I send that frame to the back, but it hides behind images in that case, and I think that a stamp on top with, say, a 20% opacity would look better overall.
Dan Lemke of Thomson Reuters
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sdcinvan
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Re: How to place a text box in front of an image

Post by sdcinvan »

ThomsonReuters_Dan wrote:I am trying to get the opacity to work in PDF output. Anybody have experience with this working or not working?

I have a decoration frame in my page layouts that contains a variable wrapped in a div.watermark. The idea being that if a PDF needs a watermark, someone could simply type the text into the variable in the target; if no watermark is needed, they simply leave the variable blank.

This works okay if I send that frame to the back, but it hides behind images in that case, and I think that a stamp on top with, say, a 20% opacity would look better overall.
Join the disgruntled party. Although I am trying to ease off on my complaints... this inability remains one of my most frustrating Flare inabilities. :x

Basically, Flare's support for images (bitmap and vector) is very poor. Unless you are willing to invest a lot of time playing with stylesheets, you are going to struggle with (and likely fail) when attempting transparent overlays (over text or other images), vector and fixed size text bubbles, image maps for PDF documents, and other such graphical content that would be a breeze in FM.

It is very frustrating but I am hopeful that with enough complaining, we will see improvements.

Two examples of image overlays that are not possible in Flare:
Image_overlay.png
image_overlays.png
Example of MadCap Caption rendering problem when publishing to Word: http://forums.madcapsoftware.com/viewto ... 13&t=20033
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Shawn in Vancouver, Canada
Main tools used: Flare 11.x, InDesign, Google Docs, Lectora, Captivate.
Report bugs: https://www.madcapsoftware.com/feedback/bugs.aspx ▪ Feature requests: https://www.madcapsoftware.com/feedback ... quest.aspx[/i]
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