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by Karen Shirron.
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Picture Placement...
I am one who likes to take pictures and tell stories using those pics. Anyone who knows me is familiar with my babbling...BUT I have had a number of people ask, "how do you do that?" It really is quite simple and I will do my best to explain 'HOW' in this tutorial.
To see the completed sample, click HERE
Getting Started...
Gather together a few pictures or graphics, putting them together where you can find them easily. If using several, I try not to have them larger than about 300px in width, and or height. If you need to resize, Irfanview does this quite easily.
STEP 1
From the main window click on 'CREATE MESSAGE'. Your Address book will open....select your addressee. Once in the Quick Message window, click on the THEME button. Here we will set the basics for our background.
1. Click on stationery image and browse to where you have a seamless background image you want to use. Alternatively...You could click 'CLEAR' here and just pick a background COLOR in the #4 portion.
2. Be sure you have a check in 'BOTH' so your background repeats over the whole screen. SET your margins. I generally use 100 right and 100 left and 10 top. Check YES in the 'SCROLL' box.
3.Pick the colors you want to use for your 'SCROLL BAR'. This can be simply choosing the FACE and BASE colors if you choose to use the Quick setting or choosing ALL colors if using the Detailed setting. Mark 'YES' for show scroll bar. And if you want a 'Color Border' on the outside, pick your COLOR and the BORDER SIZE.
4. Set your message FONT STYLE, SIZE, and COLOR.
* IF you did NOT use a stationery background image above, the ' BACK ' in this box is where you would set a COLOR.
5. IF you want a ' MAIL-TO ' image, your ' WEB PAGE INFO ', and or a ' TAG LINE ' ...set these here. *Note* Your tag option set in your Tag Preferences will over rule that which is set in the Theme window...
Once you have done these basics, click VIEW to see if it is to your liking. Click DONE to close the view window and then click OK from the theme window and you will now be here:
Move your cursor down below your 'HELLO' in the body of your message and we are ready for the story part!
STEP 2
Start writing some of your message and then we will be ready to insert our first picture. Click on the PICTURE button and browse to the folder where you have assembled your pictures. Highlight the first one and click 'SELECT'.
The 'PICTURE PROPERTIES' box will open. The main setting we need to pay attention to is shown below where the mouse cursor is pointing.
*NOTE*: This setting which we will have 'LEFT' for the first picture will alternate left, right, left etc in order for our text to wrap around the pictures.
Mokie will set your 'left' and 'right' margins automatically. When choosing a pic placement of 'left', the right margin will be 20 and the left will be 0.
The opposite will happen when picking a 'right' placement picture. (If your screen does not reflect that from a previous usage, then adjust it now.)
IF you want a 'MOUSE-OVER TEXT' for your picture...set it now.
You should also have 'RELATIVE' for your setting....NOT 'ABSOLUTE'.
We are not using any 'transitions' for this tutorial.
Click DONE and we are back to the 'REPLY' window.
Continue on with your story until you are ready to add the 2nd picture...Repeat the steps above for opening the next picture. Be sure you CHANGE the 'LEFT' setting to 'RIGHT'! IF you have used a 'MOUSE-OVER TEXT', be sure to change that as well.
With 2 pictures now added to your story, your reply window will start to appear something like this.
Continue doing the same with the other pictures for your story. The next one will have a 'LEFT' placement and then 'RIGHT' and so on....
STEP 3
Our pictures are now in place and the story is written.
I often click on the 'VIEW MESSAGE IN BROWSER' button to see how it is looking. In order for there to be some space between paragraphs, thoughts, or pictures, you might need to use the 'BR' button as shown above. If you will notice in the message body of the screen cap above, you will see several places where I have added 'BREAKS'. This is something you will have to play with for your own individual story...
A Little Trick...
By placing pictures left and right and meandering your text around them, you can give your messages a very lively kind of 'newspaper' look. The only tricky thing is how to make sections of the text start at the next picture. Of course you can add a number of line-break tags, however, with those who have wide screen monitors rather than the "normal" size, the result can look quite different. Now here is the trick: You can add the CLEAR command to the STYLE of the line-break tag...
You can use clear:left. clear:right or clear:both to push the next line of text below a picture, no matter the size or the resolution of the monitor. You can see that I used it in this lesson text many times; I put the extended line-break tag after each text section to move the next paragraph 'below' the pictures.
You're done..!
That's all there is to it! You can now click on the 'SEND' button or the 'SEND LATER' button to put it in your outbox. I OFTEN use the 'SEND LATER' button when writing a story so that I can check easily the size of the message. If it is too large, then I will go back and either resize the pics used, or the way I babble, I sometimes will turn one message into 2 chapters! ;-))
One final piece of advice:
If you have spent a long time writing a story, you might want to save it for later use...In which case you would click on the EXPORT button and name and save it as an HTML file or even as an MMF file.
If you want to later use the same story to send to someone else, click on 'CREATE MESSAGE', clear your reply window, click on the SCRIPT button ,browse to your saved HTML story file (or MMF file), select it and Voila! Your story is back...ready to send again! You may need to 'EDIT' in the story who it is going to but that's it!
I hope this has helped you to understand picture placement in Mokum Mail.
If you have any comments or questions, you can send me a message to Karen Shirron by clicking HERE
Karen Shirron