by David
Nagel
Executive
Producer
dnagel@digitalmedianet.com
It seems more
and more users in the forums here are trying to get Adobe ImageReady
and Macromedia Dreamweaver to work together. ImageReady, of course,
is geared toward use with Adobe's own GoLive, while Dreamweaver
prefers files imported from Macromedia's own Fireworks. But can
ImageReady and Dreamweaver play well together?
Yes, they
certainly can. It's not a terribly difficult process, but it's
also not a convenient one. Nevertheless, it can be done.
Let's say
we want to create an interactive animation in ImageReady. Nothing
fancy, just a rollover button for this example, along with a few
slices to spice things up. In the example you see here, I've simply
created a button that shows the head of Steve Jobs in the "Normal"
state and the head of Bill Gates in the "Over" state.
Seems simple enough, right? Well, it is and it isn't.
When you create
an interactive rollover in Adobe ImageReady, you're going to generate
some JavaScript. No matter how simple or complicated the animation
is, you're going to have to deal with it in exactly the same way.
In all cases, you will have three distinct blocks of code you
need to move from one HTML document to another without disrupting
the relative links that are generated by ImageReady. Preparing
for this move is the hard part.
1.
The hard part
The main difficulty in dealing with ImageReady files in Dreamweaver
has to do with planning. After all, ImageReady is going to write
an HTML file using relative links for images, and, more likely
than not, you're not going to want to put your ImageReady slices
in the same folder as your HTML file. So the first step is to
figure out where you want everything. Most important, consider
where you want your images to go. We're going to work in one directory
to begin with, then move our HTML file out of that directory.
You'll see why later.
When you export your animation
from ImageReady, you can customize
the name of the images directory. After you select "Save
Optimized
As," click on the "Output Settings" button. Then
select the "Saving
Files" option, and rename the images directory.
So, for now,
export your ImageReady file into your desired Images folder within
your site. If your main images folder on your site is called "Images"
or something similar, you'll probably want to rename the folder
that ImageReady creates. Do this as a part of the export process,
rather than doing it later.
page
1,
2, 3,
complete, Home
