The Find and Replace Panel

A potentially tedious task can be avoided using Firework’s Find and Replace Panel. Anybody who has spent any time with a word processor is probably familiar with this function. You can, for example, go through single or multiple documents and find the name of your company’s old vice president and replace it that of the new vice president’s.

Firework’s Find and Replace Panel allows you to do just that and much more. Remember that text in a Firework’s document is rendered as a vector and remains editable in the programs native file format. You can change text in exactly the same way that you would using a word processor.

You can access the Find and Replace Panel by selecting it from "Window/Find and Replace" under the Menu Bar.

The Search Location drop down menu at the top of the Panel allows you to choose how wide or how narrow you want your search to be. You can confine your search to a selection on your screen or broaden it to search individual frames within your document, search the whole document, search your project log (which we will be discussing later in the unit), or search multiple files.

The second drop down menu allows you to choose the kind of content that you would like to replace. You cannot only replace text but also fonts, colors, URLs, and non-web safe colors.

The Find and Replace Fields change depending on the type of content that you have specified in the Search Type drop down menu.  

Both the Text and URL options allow you to use the case of a word as a criterion for replacement. If you {Click} on the "Match Case" checkbox in the Panel, Fireworks will only replace words that match the Find term in both spelling and capitalization.

The Color and Web safe Find and Replace Options allow you to narrow your changes down to Fills, Strokes, Effects or combinations of all three. This is useful if, for instance, you only need to change the outline of a logo throughout your website.

Using the Web safe Find and Replace on your documents will make absolutely certain that anyone, even those with the most basic computer systems and color displays, will be able to view your pages by reducing your graphics colors to the 8-bit Web safe color palette.

The Font Replace options allow you to replace fonts based on their size and style.

The Find and Replace Pop Out Menu gives you some choice as to how your graphics are saved. {Click} on the small black arrow at the top right corner of the panel to access these options. Select the second item in the list and the "Replace Options" dialog box will appear.

These options pertain to multi-file replacement. {Click}on "Save and Close Files" if you don’t need to perform any subsequent edits on files after they’ve been processed by the Find and Replace function. Fireworks open the files you’ve selected just long enough to perform the changes and then closes them. This option allows you to perform a large number of replacements without cluttering your desktop.

Fireworks also gives you the option of making backups of the files you process. Select one of the three options from the "Backup Original Files" drop down menu.

As you can see the Find and Replace Panel is a powerful and versatile tool that expands on the ability of its word processor equivalent. You can easily make site-wide changes if you maintain copies of your website’s original Fireworks work files.