Creating your own Navigation Bars

You can create a NavBar from any button design. See Creating your own Mouseover Buttons" section of the Getting Started chapter for information on how to draw your own buttons from scratch. The button may or may not include a mouseover state.

To create a NavBar, select the button and then select "Arrange" > "Create Navigation Bar". The Navigation Bar dialog appears and you can immediately add more buttons to your bar, just as for other NavBars.

You can also create NavBars with more than one button design (so you can have different designs for the first and/or last button in the bar). See the section below, which describes how to do that.

Button design restrictions

There are some rules you must follow when creating your own buttons for use in NavBars.

Stretchy button limitations

In order to get reliable results when your buttons are automatically stretched you are advised to make sure that there are no path control points or graduated fill/transparency control points in the horizontal area occupied by the button label text object.

Text in a button

Each state of the button design must be a group object containing a text object that can serve as the button label. This text object should be a simple text object, not a text column or text area. That is, it should be created in the Text Tool by clicking on the page and typing, not by first dragging a text line or text box.

Your button design cannot consist of text alone. It must include at least one shape in order to be used in a NavBar.

Soft grouping button states

If there are several states in your button, e.g., mouseoff and mouseover, they need to be soft grouped together, so that they stay together when one state is moved or otherwise transformed.