With Lectora and Lectora Online, you can add a number of styles and effects to your images, shapes and buttons. Create professional-quality graphics without purchasing additional image editing software or hiring a graphic designer.
Adorners
When you add one of these objects, the object adorner – the rectangle surrounding the object when you select it – appears with the object. Object adorners allow you to rotate or flip images, shapes and buttons. You can also find shortcut buttons on the Position & Size ribbon. (This works the same in Lectora Online, except that the rotation angle is displayed in a small pop-up window. It is updated as you rotate the image.)
Let’s take a look at the new effects available for the images in your title, and then we’ll look at the additional options you have with shapes and buttons.
Images
You can find the image effects and options on the Style ribbon for images:
- Borders: It’s easy to add a border around any image. Just select the border weight, color and line style.
- Opacity: If you need to layer text over images or blend images together, you can adjust the opacity setting to make the image transparent.
- Shadow: To add a shadow to your image, select from one of nine predefined options in the gallery from the Shadow drop-down. You can also customize the shadow by selecting Shadow Options and setting the color, transparency, blur, angle and distance to create a unique shadow or blur effect.
- Reflection: Select from the gallery of options in the Reflection drop-down to add a reflection effect on the image.
- Crop: To trim or remove a portion of an image, select the Crop button from the Style ribbon. The adorners will now display black handles you can adjust to determine which areas of the image to keep, and which to crop from view. When you are finished, select a different object or click on the page. You can easily undo your changes by selecting Undo Crop from the Crop drop-down. Note that cropping an image will leave your original resource file intact. The resource will only be modified in your published title.
Shapes and Buttons
Just like images, shapes and buttons also have a new Style ribbon, where you can find the border, opacity, shadow and reflection effects you just learned about.
In addition to these properties, you can also set a Fill Style and Text Style on shapes and buttons.
Fill Style
You can select a solid color, a gradient, a texture fill or a picture fill to customize the interior of a shape or button.
- Solid Color: You can choose to use a solid color for your shape or button fill. Select from the color palette, use a custom color, choose from a previously saved color or use the eyedropper tool to select a color used on your desktop.
- Gradient: When you open the Gradient gallery, you can select a number of Light or Dark options. The gradient is applied based on the solid color already applied to your shape or button. Select More Gradients to open the Gradient window, where you can customize the color, direction and number of stops in the gradient.
- Texture Fill: A texture fill is tiled across your shape or button. Choose from the library of predefined textures like the wood, denim or grass images available. You can also select an image from your saved My Media folder or your browser for additional files. Once you add an image, the resource will become available in the drop-down underneath the Fill Style on the Style ribbon. From here, you can easily select a different image used in your project.
- Picture Fill: A picture fill will fit the picture to the shape without tiling it. The selected image will be listed underneath the Fill Style on the Style ribbon, so you can swap it out quickly.
Text Style
In both Lectora and Lectora Online, you can double-click on any shape or button and begin typing text directly on the page. To customize the look of the text, use the Text Style options on the Style ribbon. Choose from an existing Text Style, or select a Font, Font Size and Color. You can Bold, Italicize or Underline the text. You can also choose to left, center or right-align the text inside the shape or button.
This article last reviewed Dec, 2015. The software may have changed since the last review. Please visit our Release Notes to learn more about version updates.