LUGNET News : ~105/viewer/

Alexandra Franks / viewer /

Stuff Viewer

What is it?

It’s nothing more than a small collection of buttons and borders and a method of putting them together to display a collection of images, such as the ones here.

How would I use it in my pages?

Resizing
The default tiles are 32x32 pixels. For simplicity, you might find it easier to resize your image to multiples of 32 for both width and height, you’ll need to remember to uncheck the “Maintain aspect ratios” box in many paint packages to do this.

If you don’t wish to mess with the scale of your image, then to make it fit nicely, you’ll need to crop filler shapes to size from the existing horizontal or vertical filler templates.

Putting it all together
If you look at the raw FTX, it will look pretty horrid, but it can be demonstrated a lot more cleanly.

Each segment of links represents a row - so starting with the top-left hand corner tlcrn.gif, we go across with horizontal filling pieces hfill.gif, repeated (image width / 32) times, and ending with the top-right corner trcrn.gif.

When creating pages using this method, they will display like this. To join up everything properly, you need to put EVERYTHING on the one line. This is straightforward for rows, but between rows you will need to insert the character:

¬

Please note that some browsers will wrap ridiculously long lines. Don’t worry - this is perfectly normal, the above example wraps to about three lines in my version of Netscape.

Buttons

There are several template buttons:

home.gif		Which root or home page you wish to associate with the current page

text.gif		Link to more information about a model.

back.gif		Normal navigation tool.

forw.gif		Normal navigation tool.

Each of these buttons have a shaded out version, prefixed by an underscore _ eg. _forw.gif, for when the user has reached the end of a non wrap-around list.

The buttons and borders are a bit plain...

I know - it was a proof of concept really, nothing more - I’m not an artist :)

If you want to create your own then you can download the templates or draw them from scratch. Any that are sent to me will be linked to here.

Stuff not Covered

I’ve not gone over the usage of links, alternate labels etc, as they are all expertly covered here.

Primary content in this document is © Alexandra Franks. All other text, images, or trademarks in this document are the intellectual property of their respective owners.