Setting Up, Modifying, and Navigating Fireworks Documents
This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
Chapter 3: Setting Up, Modifying, and Navigating Fireworks Documents
In this chapter
- Getting Off to a Good Start
- Creating New Documents
- Opening Existing Documents
- Inserting Graphic Assets into a Fireworks Document
- Modifying Documents
- Navigating within Documents
- Organizing Documents
Getting Off to a Good Start
With many programs, such as Word or Excel, creating a new document is a simple matter of clicking a New button, and a blank page or spreadsheet opens that is a pretty good starting point for your project. Fireworks—and graphics programs in general—is a bit different. Most of what you create in Fireworks is actually created for a different destination—in most cases, this is Dreamweaver, but it could also be Flash, a code editor, or even a print-oriented program such as FreeHand.
Because your files could end up as elements on a Web page, a whole page design itself, a logo for a print ad, or an asset for Flash, there is no generic setting with which all new documents start. At the same time, just as Fireworks files often end up going through another program before they go into production, other files often come through Fireworks along their own production paths. These could include photo montages created on Photoshop, vector drawings made in FreeHand or Illustrator, and so on.
In short, in contrast to most office productivity software, setting up a Fireworks file often involves some legwork. Making the wrong decision at the beginning can cause headaches later. This chapter covers a range of aspects of this process, including creating new documents, opening and importing existing documents and assets, navigating in Fireworks, and Fireworks' document-level modification options.