User Guide

TOPIC D
Using the Drawing Tools
You’ve added pictures that were already created for you. In this topic, you will learn how to
create your own pictures on a page.
Sometimes you are in a hurry and you have an idea of what you want a picture to look like,
but you just don’t have time to wait for the Art department to create a picture for you. What
do you do? Use FrontPage’s drawing tools to create a just-in-time solution.
Use the Drawing Tools
Procedure
Reference:
FrontPage 2002 now supports drawing tools like the other Microsoft Office
applications, storing your AutoShapes, drawings, and WordArt as a series of
shapes—not as pictures themselves. In fact, you can copy drawings from other
Office XP programs and paste them directly into FrontPage. If you are going to
add drawn objects to add life to a page, we recommend placing the objects
into a drawing canvas. (A drawing canvas is an area that can contain drawn
elements.) The primary benefit of this is simple. A drawing canvas reserves a
resizable area in a page specifically for drawn objects so you can keep all of
them together.
1
Place the insertion point where you want the drawing canvas to be.
2
Choose Insert→Picture→New Drawing.
3
Use the Drawing toolbar to create and format elements.
4
Use the Drawing Canvas toolbar to size the canvas.
5
Deselect the drawing canvas.
A drawing canvas can be formatted like any other object in FrontPage—
double-click on the canvas to change its color and line formatting, size, layout,
and so on.
FrontPage uses Vector Markup Language (VML) to display drawn objects. The
upside is that such a format displays very fast in a browser that supports it.
The downside is, at the time this was written, only Microsoft Internet Explorer
5.0 and later do support it. To accommodate this shortcoming, FrontPage can
save the drawn elements as a GIF; and if the elements are in a drawing can-
vas, all of them are saved as a single GIF file.
You can draw objects individually outside a drawing canvas; however, if a
browser doesn’t support VML, each object will be displayed as a separate
GIF, increasing the page’s download time.
If some tools on the Drawing toolbar are grayed out, verify that your page
compatibility settings allow VML graphics. (Choose Tools→Page Options and
select the Compatibility tab. Under Available Technologies, check both VML
Graphics and Downlevel Image File.)
LESSON 4
Lesson 4: Adding Visual Appeal to a Web 51
Reference Material
Please Do Not Copy