MadCap Software Forums

I have a pic of a screen and I want the user to be able to click or preferably just hover over an area of the image and up comes a smallish bit of information in a box on that area. Then when they either click or move the mouse away it just disappears.

Is there some way to do this where separate files for each bit of help don't have to be created? That all seems too laborious.

I have Mimic too and I'm wondering whether that is the way to go. I haven't used it at all yet though and I don't have tons of time to learn all about it right now...so hoping it's possible in Flare using image map...but image map seems to want external files.

Thanks for any suggestions.

Hi,

One possible solution may be:

Put the required text into the 'Screen Tip' field on the image map box.
Set the 'Link To' to be 'Place in this Document' .
In the right hand pane select 'top of document'.

This removes the need for external links, and if the user accidentally clicks, then the top of the document is displayed.

HTH

Regards

Adrian

If you're going to go with Adrian's option, I'd put the text in the Screen Tip and the Alt field. The Screen Tip puts the text into the title attribute of the img tag and not all browsers support it, but they all support the Alt tag.

However, there is Javascript you can add to a topic that will respond to mouseover and mouseout events, although you should test the scripts in both IE and Firefox and as many other browsers as you can, since, again, not all browsers support the same functionality. If you use JS in the topic, then you don't need to use a different topic for the popup content -- the content is contained in separate DIVs that are hidden initially and that are shown when you mouseover the correct area. Just be aware that you most likely will need to open the topic in the Internal Text Editor to add the code and modify it for your situation. And if the user has Javascript turned off in the browser then they won't see it, but you could add other code that detects if JS is turned off and lets them know that it needs to be turned on for that page to work.

Flare doesn't have such scripts included, but there are plenty of places on the Internet that have free code you can use. For Javascript, I like http://javascript.internet.com/.

Thanks very much for these responses. I've put the text in the screen tip and Alt fields as suggested.

Now I have another question...

Is there somewhere I can change the length of time the text stays on the screen? It needs to stay visible for a bit longer.

I'm actually really surprised there isn't a proper feature in Flare for doing this kind of help on pics...like a simple-ish dialog with a few choices on the look and size of the popup window and where text and small graphics could be entered and also where it stays visible till the user clicks. I suppose creating the external files is the way Flare wants this done. I may have to resort to that but I was hoping there was a 'feature' for it somewhere. Something like the Text Popup but to be used on images would be great.

Thanks for the help everyone!

DebB09 wrote:Something like the Text Popup but to be used on images would be great.

Shouldn't be too hard to implement (says the non-programmer). Submit a feature request at http://www.madcapsoftware.com/bugs/submit.aspx.