Soft Shadows on Pages Not Displaying Correctly

There are some instances when Freeway's soft shadows (set in the Effects panel of the Appearance tab of the Inspector) will not publish correctly.

There are quite a few different reasons why this may occur, but the most common cause is when a stack of items with the Target Show/Hide Image Action or Target Show/Hide Layer Action applied is used with a Rollover or the Sequence Timer Action. See the screenshot below - the left-hand image shows the problem shadow, the right-hand image is how it should look.



The problem is usually caused by Freeway applying the soft shadow to a JPEG (the default file type for photos and other tonal graphics) which, because JPEGs don't support transparency, it creates by taking a snapshot of the graphic and its shadow along with the background immediately behind the item on the page. However, because Freeway takes the browser background to be the color behind the soft shadow on all items in a stack except for the original item, the shadow for the rest of the items in the stack will not match correctly.

The way to fix it is to choose a file type which does support transparency. Although GIF supports transparency, it is best used for continuous tone graphics and text - the better choice for photos and tonal graphics is PNG.

Select the top item in the stack on your Freeway page, go to the Output tab of the Inspector, click and hold on the Type popup, change JPEG to PNG and change Colors popup to Millions. Now Alt-Command-click to select the next item in the stack and repeat the process. By Alt-Command-clicking through the stack you can click through to select and change each item in turn.

When you preview the page in a browser, the problem should now be fixed.