Text only

Adding a text only navbar is very simple, go to the themed graphic tab, add a vertical or horizontal navbar, any one will do, then either double click the navbar, or right click and select edit navigation bar to bring up the navigation bar setting dialog box.

This is the main dialog for altering text only, and is pretty self explanatory.

One note of caution, WebPlus X2 patch 6 has a problem with large size ‘text only’, displayed in IE browsers,  though its OK in firefox excluding IE is not a good idea, no information is known on whether Serif will fix this problem.

Colour and

Highlight colour can be set to none, giving a transparent background

However border cannot, so for no border simply set the

Border size to ‘0’

Adding transparency works the same as adding it to a box

Automatically resize width, does just as it says, on vertical navbars it will make the navbar as big as the longest page name + 15 pixels each side, on a horizontal navbar it adjusts the spacing between each page title, to 15 pixels both sides of a page name, so between page names there is approximately 30 pixels spacing + another 15 at each end, NOTE the setting ‘make all buttons the same size’ in the navigation type tab, has no effect on text only navbars

As stated above the following is approximate only and calculated through experiments not from documentation.

The setting ‘fixed width’ overrides the automatic width, one would think that a setting of 3 pages at 150 pixels would result in a vertical bar 150 wide, and horizontal bar 450 wide - not so,

For the exercises below, the page word length was obtained by typing the typing in the name as artistic text, and reading the width from the transform tab.

WP increases the width in approximately the following manner

On vertical bars it is the fixed width (eg 150) + approximately 15 pixels each side, example 150 +15+15 =180 width navbar. However one cannot go smaller in navbar size than the longest word + 30 pixels, so say your longest page name was 68 pixels wide, although the fixed width will allow you to enter down to 50,  below 68 it will make no difference, the minimum physical size of the navbar would be 68 + 30 = 98 pixels wide (approximately).

For horizontal bars it works out as fixed width (eg 150) + 15 pixels each side of a page name,  multiplied by the number of pages, for example 150 width + 30 (15 pixels each side of a name) x 3 pages so 150 + 30 = 180 x 3 pages = 540 pixel wide navbar

However here it gets complicated, the above only works out if the fixed width is equal or greater than the length of the longest page name, which in this example would be 68,  Below this figure one must take into account the different lengths of the page names, and it’s easier to use a trial and error approach.

Lets look at a quick example, you have 5 pages and the longest page name is 68 pixels wide (approximately), then as long as the fixed width is above this your fine, you have a page that is 780 pixels wide and you want the navbar to span the page,

Therefore 5 pages * 30 pixels (spaces) = 150, so 780 - 150 = 630, divide this by the number of pages is 630 / 5 =  126

Therefore setting the fixed width to 126 should span the page, give or take a pixel or two

NOTE - the information below is only approximate, as it can varies depending on font type and font size

Note,  there are still bugs in the text navbars, serif are aware of them, but no information on a fix is known at this time,

One of these is a slight shift in size of vertical navbar when published, this would not normally cause anyone a problem unless one was using hand drawn lines in between the text  - with trial and error this is easy to work around.  

A second thing is the text quality when viewed in IE, which can look degraded, so always preview in IE if using a text only navbar.