It was quick, it was rapid, it hurried swiftly, that iWeb update of aught seven. It’s accelerated hastiness caught many users of the app unaware! Was there a wake?

Yes.

Were there things left in it?

Ohhhh, yes.

And those things... that were discarded... bereft by that thing what did the refting... were multitudinous! (wait a tick, that’s a REAL word?) I meant to say UTTERMULTITUDINOUS! (Take THAT in your Z-section, Webster!)

Some of the more obvious problems with my site, I’d come upon fairly quickly (some have been discussed or were you paying attention?!) Others had done a fairly good job lurking within some page posted looong ago waiting to spring upon me like a national level thought leader in search of a cogitant remnant (I wish for you, dear reader, that if you know not of such a thing, that you never experience it!). The page in question, and, as a result, where my answer needed to be directed to, was this ‘un. I had thought I’d been on the near side of brilliant when I figured out using Webdings for a rollover effect. Everything was simultaneously hunky and dorey until the update when something helpful became not quite so in a different context. Confused? Me, too, but I don’t let it stop me and neither should you. ONWARD!

This is slightly related to another issue iWeb was notorious for, turning text into images. Sometimes, for no known reason, large swaths of text would be rendered as an image and would be stuck that way. Sometimes you could get around it, sometimes not, but it was a bugaboo for many. I believe it was decided to make iWeb just a wee bit nicer and to be more relaxed about it’s conversion policy. This was a GREAT thing for those who had text wrongly converted to images, but not so great for some... a few... well, ME who WANTED text converted to an image.

The story goes like this. Text rendered on the web for the most part isn’t under the control of the creator, it’s under the control of the viewer. YOU! You can make the font larger and smaller for example. Go ahead, give it a try. See? I’m powerless to stop you! If I force iWeb to render the text as an image, though, you’re stuck with my choice, like it or not. You lose the ability to control the size of the text and I gain the ability to control my content. So, used properly, it could be a good thing.

On the page mentioned above, I intentionally used a Webdings font. iWeb would look at it, say, “This isn’t a web standard font, so I’ll make it an image TWING!!!” and anyone visiting it would see the image where and at the size I had determined. CONTROL WAS M ...ahem. Control was mine. The update appeared to say,”This isn’t a web standard font, but, people have been complaining so much about me turning text into images, sooooooooo, I’ll leave it as text.” If you happened to have the proper fonts installed, you might not have noticed a thing! If you didn’t, your browser said,”Webdings, what’s a Webding? What he really wants to use is a nice Helvetica or Arial!”

Thus, the sun would show up as an R (for Ra?) the mountain would show up as an M (for mountain?) and the bomb would show up as an M (for... mmmassively destructive bomb?). It was like this for quite awhile and I only noticed it when going to my site from a computer that didn’t have the Web or Wing-dings installed. I thought that maybe I just needed to retype it, but no, iWeb still created a page using a text object instead of images. I really could not force it by any normal way to accept it as a non-web font. Even creating an entirely new text box didn’t work. I soon tired of having to publish again and again so I hit upon the idea of going into the

preferences and turning on Show text imaging indicator. When you do this, you can see before you publish what will be turned into an image because it gets a little tag attached to it...

namely this thing over to the right.

I noticed I had other text boxes (the little info bits on how I created the image header, usually) that already had these. Since they had a color fill they’d turn to images, but I didn’t want color fills on my rollovers so that was out. What I DID do, though, was to duplicate those boxes, remove the fill and stroke and, wouldn’t you know it, they kept the little icon! Here we had text boxes that for all practical purposes looked just like the ones I had been trying to create but they kept the text to image conversion while my other ones didn’t.

As you can guess, that’s as far as I went in that investigation because, really, at that point it was working fine. Anyway, there are just some things that we’re not yet ready to know. The rollovers in the ticket at the top of that page haven’t been redone yet (and I may not ever redo them as a testament to a bygone era) so take a look at those to see the old problem. Or not. Both and either are perfectly fine!