Inserts a "floating" text box, initially placed in the upper left of the layout area, above all other previously inserted items. The text block contains some default text as the default font and font size, selected ready for overwriting. Simply type over the selection. You can then select parts of your text and format – using the Font and Font Size dropdown menus, the text/line color button and the text format buttons (such as Bold, Italic, Underline). Text can be formatted down to individual letters.

You can then move and resize the text block. Resizing does not change the actual font size, but dynamically reformats the word wrapping to accommodate the new shape. This is the most common and useful way of adding text to your presentation. Only text that is in a text box can be animated and have special effects applied.

Opens a dialog box where you can select any HTML-compliant image, such as JPEG, GIF and PNG. A copy of the image is made in your project folder. The image can be resized and moved.

Transparency information in the source file is maintained in the output, so if you have a GIF or PNG file with transparency information, it will be converted to transparency data that the Flash Player will understand.

NOTE: due to limitations of the Internet Explorer Layout Engine, some PNG files with transparency will not be displayed correctly in FvReader. This means that they may appear with an opaque Grey area where it should be transparent. This will export correctly, however. Satisfy yourself that this is correct by Previewing the page (see View/Preview).

Shapes

A few simple shape types are available in FvReader:

Rectangle

Oval

Line selector

The lines are horizontal, vertical and two diagonals (slope up and slope down). The lines can be moved around to change the end-points, and the diagonals can be reshaped to change their angles.

All shapes (except shapes filled with a gradient) can have line color and thickness. The Ovals and Rectangles can either have flat fills or gradient fills. See the Draw Settings menu.

Table

This inserts an HTML table into the layout with some place-holder text. While the table has visible borders, this is only as a guide and will not be published in the Flash output. The intended purpose of the table is for laying out tabular text data. Table data can be animated, but it's unlikely this would be useful.

Bullet list

This puts up a dialog box. See the bullet list dialog help for more information.