Re: Automating the creation of buttons

[Oliver Paukstadt <nospam@thanx>]

On Tue, 1 Feb 2000, Tom Limoncelli wrote:

> Does anyone have a good automated method to generate buttons, like the ones
> on the WML web page?  In theory, GIMP should be programmable enough to do
> this, but I've found it to be frustrating.

I did button-auto-generation in many ways ;-)

One solution is generating the buttons with the navigation-information
during the WMLrun, the other Method is generating them with extra
scripts/make.
First method is more consitent but a WML run then needs much more time.
And often it is not needed to regenerate the Buttons every run.

There are many ways to generate the Buttons itself. If they should look
all the same and only the text differs, generate the empty button manual
with for example gimp and use gfont or gd with ttf-support to generate the
text and add it with pnmarith/pnmpaste/pbmmask from the netpbm-package.

For those with too much idel-time is the solution povray ;-) You can
render great buttons with ttf-texts on it but it takes much time.

Another solution is to use gs and define your buttons in postscript. This
is a little bit confusing sometimes, because the gs-rip does not interpret
the ps-sources in the way you meant ist, for example ugly and unwantet 
peeks and artifacts. And it is very difficult do soft color changes.

I think most important tools for autogenerating images are gfont and gd
with ttf-support and the pnm/ppm/pgm/pbm-tools (RH: libgr-progs-*.rpm).
And if you need a raw and empty base-button, use gimp  ;-)

And I think, if you get paid for this job, take the time to learn how
to use that gimp-script-language from perl ;-)

BYtE Oli

+++Oh my god, they killed INIT. ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
+++oliver@paukstadt.de+++http://www.paukstadt.de/ ++++++++++++++++++++++++
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ 


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