Image, Shape and Button Effects in Lectora 12

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With Lectora® e-Learning software’s latest release, we’ve given you the ability to add a number of styles and effects to your images, shapes and buttons. In Lectora 12, you can easily create professional-quality graphics without purchasing additional image editing software or hiring a graphic designer.

Adorners

The first thing you’ll notice when you add one of these objects is that the object adorner, or rectangle surrounding the object when you select it, has been updated. Lectora’s new object adorners allow you to rotate or flip images, shapes and buttons. You can also find shortcut buttons on the Position & Size ribbon.

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 Lectora 12’s new image effects and options on the Image Style ribbon.

  • 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

Great news! The same effects that have been added to images in Lectora 12 are also available for 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: Like earlier versions of Lectora, 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 Lectora 12, 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.

Learn more about the button states options on the Button Style Ribbon in last week’s blog post on Customizing Button States in Lectora 12.

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