That's it! Job well done.
In this lesson, you learned how to:
• Add a paragraph object
• Turn off the paragraph object's vertical scroll bar
• Add actions to make the text dynamic, so it changes in response to events
• Add actions to the page's On Show and On Preload events
• Move an action from one event to another
L ess o n 6 : S c r o lli n g T ex t
Scrolling text is just text that can be scrolled, either vertically, horizontally, or in both directions. In AutoPlay, scrolling text can be displayed by using a paragraph object, which has built-in support for vertical and horizontal scroll bars.
Scrolling text is useful whenever you want to display more text than you can fit in a given space. For example, if you need to display a long license agreement, or the contents of a readme.txt file, or an article on cubicle horticulture penned by your favorite geek auteur.
What You'll Learn
In this lesson, you'll learn how to:
• Add a panel image to serve as a backdrop and border for some text
• Replace the text in a paragraph object by shift-dragging a text file
• Add a scrollable paragraph object
• Use a custom scroll bar style
How Long Will It Take?
This lesson takes approximately 15 minutes to do.
If you're continuing from Lesson 5, you should still have AutoPlay running with the Tutorial project open. If so, you're ready to move on to the next exercise: Adding a Video Object.
Otherwise, you'll need to open the project file that you saved at the end of Lesson 5.
1 ) Op e n t h e Tu t o r i a l. a u t opl ay f il e t h a t y ou s ave d in L e ss on 5 .
When you save a project, AutoPlay automatically creates a project folder for it inside your "My Documents\AutoPlay Media Studio 8\Projects" folder. This project folder is where everything that belongs to the project is stored-including the project file, which contains all of the settings used in the project.
The project folder and the project file always have the same name that you gave to the project when it was created. The project file's name ends with a ".autoplay" file extension.
Since you named this project "Tutorial" in Lesson 1, the name of the project folder will be Tutorial, and the name of the project file will be Tutorial.autoplay. So, the path to the project file should be something like:
...\My Documents\AutoPlay Media Studio 8\Projects\Tutorial\Tutorial.autoplay
To open the project, you just need to open that project file.
Adding a Panel Image
A panel image is just an image object that you put behind another object to achieve some kind of custom background or picture frame effect. Although you can use any image for this purpose, AutoPlay comes with a number of images that were designed to do just that.
Panel images are especially helpful at providing a sort of "mini-background" behind a bunch of text, to make the text easier to read than it would be on the page background itself. (This comes in handy for those times when you're using a really wild image for the page background.) They can also be used to provide a fancy border to "section off" an area of the page.
Note: The paragraph object has an optional border and background color, which can serve the same purpose as a panel image in many cases. For really cool, professional borders and backgrounds, though, a panel image is the way to go.
1 ) S wi t c h t o t h e A bou t T e d p a g e .
We're going to add the panel image and the paragraph object to the About Ted page, so before you do anything else, click on the "About Ted" page tab at the top of the work area.
2 ) S wi t c h t o t h e G a ll ery p a n e a nd c li ck t h e I ma g e s bu tt on.
The Gallery pane is tabbed with the Project pane on the right side of the AutoPlay program window. You can switch between these tabbed panes by clicking on the appropriate tab.
Note: Earlier we made the Gallery and Project panes visible. If they are not visible, you can make them visible by using the View > Panes submenu.