Scroller

Overview

The Scroller applet will scroll text or graphics in an area of the screen. The content can scroll from any direction--up, down, left, or right. Each scrolled object can act as a link to another page, which will be displayed in the browser. Note: At the time of this release, this applet runs only in Netscape Navigator 3.0.

Setting up the scroller

When you drag this applet to the HoTMetaL PRO document, a dialog box (called a Design-Time Control) appears; this enables you to set up the scroller.

The fields in this dialog box should be filled out as follows:

Applet parameters

• Height and Width specify the amount of space in the main browser window that will be reserved for this applet. These set the the height and width of the area in which the text or images will be scrolled. The area does not resize to fit the text or image size, so you should choose height and width values that are appropriate to the effect that you wish to achieve.
• Site Root Dir: choose the folder in which the HTML page containing the applet has been saved. (This is necessary if you wish to preview the applet from your local disk.)
• Use FastLoader: a program that speeds up the loading of the applet.

Scroller Parameters

• Scroller Type: you can scroll text or images.

The following parameters apply to both text and image scrolling:

• Frames/Sec and Pixel Shift/Frame: these values determine the speed and smoothness of the scrolling. Each movement of the text or images is called a frame. Pixel shift is the number of pixels that the frame moves in each movement.
• Delay: the time between the display of each text file or image, in milliseconds (thousandths of a second).
• Target Frame: if you want the page linked to the push button to be displayed in a particular frame (if a frames-based document is being displayed in the browser), enter the frame name here.
• Background color: background color of the display area.
• Imagefile/Textfile Relative URL, Destination URL, Transition: click on Add to enter a filename or URL for an image or text file to scroll, a scrolling direction (Up, Down, Left, or Right), and optionally, a page that is linked to the scrolled file; click on an existing entry and then click on Edit to change the entry (you can also edit an entry by clicking once on the entry in the list to make it editable, and then typing your changes); click on an existing entry and then click on Remove to remove the entry.

  Note: Text files should be plain text files, not HTML or another markup format.

The following parameters apply only to text scrolling:

• Text Font: choose Helvetica, Times Roman, or Courier.
• Text Size: the point size of the scrolled text.
• Text Align: how the text is aligned with the side of the scrolling area that it scrolls from: left, right, or centered.
• Text Style: bold, italic, or plain.
• Foregrnd Color: the text color.

Click on OK when you have finished the setup. You can display this dialog box again by right-clicking on the applet icon and choosing DTC Properties... from the pop-up menu.

Running the scroller

When the browser opens the page, it automatically loads the applet and displays the scroller. Clicking on an image or piece of text will cause the browser to display the linked document (if there is one).