Text button positioning

Xavion Kron wrote on 4/3/2008, 8:17 AM
I have a DVDA3 project with a 2nd menu page that has ten links. All I want is to have them in a stright line from top to bottom. When I move a link it seems to snap from one position to the next, making it
difficult to line the links up evenly.

Is it possible to have more control of the links, are do I need to work around them snapping into position.

Comments

bStro wrote on 4/3/2008, 9:55 AM
Lots of options:

1. Turn off snapping altogether by going to the Options menu and unchecking Enable Snapping.

2. Leave Enable Snapping checked, but uncheck the type(s) of snapping you don't want (same menu as above).

3. Leave all snapping enabled, but temporarily disable snapping by holding down your Shift key, Ctrl key, or both while you move your button ("text link"). Holding down Shift temporarily disables any horizontal snapping; Ctrl disables vertical snapping; holding down both disables all snapping.

Bonus tip: In case you didn't know, there are some great positioning tools to the left of the workspace. Not only can you automatically align multiple buttons, but you can make them evenly spaced, too -- all just by selecting the objects and clicking one of the positioning buttons. Check them out if you haven't already.

Rob
johnmeyer wrote on 4/3/2008, 10:15 AM
I just did half a dozen menus yesterday with ten text menus each. Here's my workflow:

1. Turn off grid snapping.
2. Get all the text on the first button exactly the way you want. Change the font, color, shadow, left alignment etc. Also, make the length of this text box long enough to hold any of the text on the remaining nine buttons. You'll see why in the steps below.
3. Copy this text event using the standard copy function (Edit -> Copy).
4. Select all the text events, including the one you just changed (you can drag select, or any other Windows convention for quickly selecting multiple objects).
5. Paste the size attributes from the first text event (Edit -> Paste Attributes -> Size).
6. Then, paste the text attributes (Edit -> Paste Attributes --> Text Properties).
7. In the alignment tools on the left, click on the left alignment tool (third down from the top, left column in the tools area).
8. Finally, in the alignment tools on the left, click on the "Space Down" icon (next to the bottom, right side of the tools area).

Steps three through eight take about five seconds, total, to do, so this is very quick.

You will now have all ten buttons exactly the same in every way, perfectly left aligned. While they are still all grouped, you can move the unit to whatever location you wish.

When I do this, I always get all the buttons lined up while the text is really small, and don't worry about whether I can read the text or not. Also I don't worry at all about the horizontal or vertical spacing, except that the vertical position of the top and bottom buttons is important because that will determine the total space that the group of buttons will take up when I am finished.

The whole thing can be done in just a minute or two.