Text to Overlay Flash Content?
March 4, 2008 12:00 AM
I searched for the answer to this, but it does not seem to have been addressed previously.I've been given a Lectora project (I'm fairly new to the software) that was already in production, and was not being built by people familiar with Lectora.What I have is Flash animation content of a software tutorial that is sized to take up the live area with the surrounding GUI built in Lectora. This much is fine. However, one of the elements of the GUI is a button that toggles a text display to show the narration text. This text display has rounded edges and a drop shadow and is expected to overlay the Flash content. This has already been approved by the client, and they are expecting this in the final design.I have not ever been successful creating transparent overlays that appear properly over Flash content in Lectora. The only option that seems it would work is to crop the Flash content up and create text boxes that appear below the animation. This is not ideal, though, because it will leave blank whitespace if the user toggles the text off.As I mentioned, I'm fairly new to Lectora, so I'm wondering if there is an appropriate way to handle this. We do not want the text display to be created in Flash, as we do not want this to be the Flash designer's responsibility to format the text for the course (the instructional designer is developing the Lectora content and we want them to be responsible for the text flow and layout) The file will be being published to HTML (and eventually SCORM) so if I knew IE handled transparent PNG files properly, and I knew Lectora handled the overlaying properly, I would assume it would be possible to create the text box as a transparent PNG file (again, due to the drop shadow and rounded corners) and have it overlay the flash content with the text over top. However, my experience with IE is that transparent PNG files show up as white (though they're fine in, say, Firefox) and I usually have to wrestle with Lectora to properly layer anything but the objects set to always display on top.Does anyone have any suggestions for this? I'm going to keep playing around and researching it, but if anyone's been through something similar and can save me time and headaches, I would be grateful.Thanks!JeremyEdited By: jschevling on 2008-3-3 18:1:2
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