Online Buttons Generator

[Sir John Steed]

So I've been playing around with your online tool.. How do I get it to generate the buttons with a transparent background.. Simply removing the background color in my button settings doesn't seem to do the trick..

Are you talking about creating your own templates? Then please refer to post #38, there I have described in a little more detail what to do to preserve transparencies, in addition to the installation/read_me file. Please note that this will work best when creating your own button designs in Photoshop on an empty layer of course. When you try to strip the background from an exisiting button graphic (e.g. taken from the web somewhere) you might have a hard time, especially when there is antialiasing at the contours. You might succeed with using the magic wand with some tolerance (25% or so) when selecting the background to get rid of it. If you were talking about creating buttons with zen_bck to achieve transparent buttons, that would be another story.

Hi,

I have problem of ä's and ö's not appearing correctly. I got your updated version (had 1.6 first, now 1.6.3) but it still won't work properly. Instead of letter "ä", it appears "a square" in that. The peculiar thing is that in some words there may be 1 letter "ä" completely fine and another just a square.
I tested with German, Finnish etc but the same thing in all of them using special characters...

That is probably related to your .ttf-font not supporting the full unicode set of characters. That often happens with fonts by some font foundry, they often DO NOT include the full character set. Please try another font then, most standard system fonts will support the full unicode set of characters. Same goes for the very special characters found for example in the Russian language. Try a standard Windows Verdana in these cases. Let me know, I doubt it's because of something different. At least the online demo at http://zen-bck.mediakitchen.de works fine where you describe problems here. The more "Eastern" languages will only fully work with the installed Verdana though, ü/ä/ö and such should be no problem with any font installed there.

Best regards,


Sir John Steed

[DivaVocals]

Are you talking about creating your own templates? Then please refer to post #38, there I have described in a little more detail what to do to preserve transparencies, in addition to the installation/read_me file. Please note that this will work best when creating your own button designs in Photoshop on an empty layer of course. When you try to strip the background from an exisiting button graphic (e.g. taken from the web somewhere) you might have a hard time, especially when there is antialiasing at the contours. You might succeed with using the magic wand with some tolerance (25% or so) when selecting the background to get rid of it. If you were talking about creating buttons with zen_bck to achieve transparent buttons, that would be another story.

This is what I was referring to.. So are you implying that it is not possible???

[Sir John Steed]

This is what I was referring to.. So are you implying that it is not possible???

Yep, not possible to do right now. But that is in part due to the restrictions of web compatible image formats. JPEG does not support any kind of transparency, GIF does, but only for selected colors, so you always have the problem of either having 'halos' because of the antialiasing rendered for a certain background color, or you don't have antialiasing at all, which might lead to 'edgy' looking buttons. You only get real alpha transparency with PNG, but there are some things to consider with that: PNG isn't supported by any and all browsers, the shop default image format is GIF instead, and there are reported problems with GD to create PNG alpha transparencies in a reliable way with certain GD versions and such. For all these reasons I think it's a totally acceptable way for such a tool to just pick the background color of your choice and just render the button without any transparencies for that color. That's how it's done right here and now.

Best regards,


Sir John Steed

[chadderuski]

Sir John,

I would like to suggest two features for you contrib:

1) Selectable Image Directory so you can have more than one graphic set loaded.

2) The ability to save / load a button set's settings.

#1 is pretty easy to do manually... just replace the directory.

#2 would be a very useful when you are working numerous carts and need to remember all the settings for the set you created or go back at a later time to regenerate them or add something... Something simple like .txt file?

thanks,

chaddro

[tracib]

Just wanted to tell zen community that we have just finished some updates at http://zencart.buttonsworkshop.com/ So we added some more languages, also you can now save your buttons set and share it with friends and add additional custom buttons.

I just tried making some buttons from here, and no matter what color I selected, the button was always yellow. The instructions said to click on a reload button, but I couldn't find one.

I am on a mac, and tried using firefox and safari, and neither worked for me.

[Sir John Steed]

Sir John,

I would like to suggest two features for you contrib:

1) Selectable Image Directory so you can have more than one graphic set loaded.

2) The ability to save / load a button set's settings.

#1 is pretty easy to do manually... just replace the directory.

#2 would be a very useful when you are working numerous carts and need to remember all the settings for the set you created or go back at a later time to regenerate them or add something... Something simple like .txt file?

thanks,

chaddro

Chaddro, your request makes sense, especially #2. I should see when I find time to implement this, so it can be done automatically. For now you can achieve this manually by:

- writing the found values into the 'includes/zen_bck_config.php' file; you find instructions and possible values in there

- make copies of the file 'includes/zen_bck_config.php' for each preset that you want to store; if you want to activate it, you set that one to the right filename 'zen_bck_config.php'

This 'save preset' feature shouldn't be too dificult to implement in the future, but it will probably require another writable folder to hold an unlimited amount of preset files.

Best regards,


Sir John Steed

[tracib]

Sir John Steed,
I am trying to make some buttons with your generator, followed the instructions, but the previews aren't showing up. I get 2 broken link icons. I called my web host to make sure the web server is running PHP with GD (v2.0.12 or greater) and Freetype support--and it is.

Any ideas on what my problem is? I only uploaded the english language, but I doubt that would cause this problem.

Thanks!

[tracib]

Sir John Steed,
I am trying to make some buttons with your generator, followed the instructions, but the previews aren't showing up.

Well, it works! I didn't realize I had to go to the bottom and click on the preview button layout. I was too excited to make some buttons and hadn't scrolled down.

[chadderuski]

- writing the found values into the 'includes/zen_bck_config.php' file; you find instructions and possible values in there

- make copies of the file 'includes/zen_bck_config.php' for each preset that you want to store; if you want to activate it, you set that one to the right filename 'zen_bck_config.php'

This 'save preset' feature shouldn't be too dificult to implement in the future, but it will probably require another writable folder to hold an unlimited amount of preset files.

John,

Yes, this is what I have been doing (more or less). In addition to making my own custom buttons/text.

Also, having a selectable icon set would allow me to use different optimized scaled images for say larger buttons, or an icon that responds to on-hover rather than the button changing...

I am working on making an "advance" graphic button set for zencart that uses the "sliding door" method for normal, hover and on-click states. (just a matter of changing x-offset with CSS). I have done this for other sites, but on a much smaller scale.

Having the ability to generate the entire set with a few clicks and being able to save and repeat that is beyond useful.

Now, THE ULTIMATE! button generator would let me select my three states for normal, hover and clicked, generate the single stacked button and sample CSS... okay, just dreaming at the moment.

Would also like to say that I find this tool the best I've come across. And comes with some very nice usable professional looking buttons. ;p

Gotta love that!

[tracib]

I just uploaded my buttons and I'm so excited. So far the only issue I have seen is the "button_tellafriend.gif" needs to be changes to "button_TellAFriend.gif" (cap T, A, & F).

Thanks Sir John Steed! This was so quick, easy and painless!