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Article:
PIM Team Case Study: Creating Text Effects With PHP and GD by: Bobby Handzhiev See how you can create graphic effects on text with PHP and GD - drop shadows, arcs, fonts and colors. Problem A-tec Signs and Sraphics Inc. launched a web site with the idea to sell decals online. To achieve better customers ineterest the website had to integrate online decal builder. The company is offering also decals for vehicles which brought some specific requirements to the builder like having the decal text turning arround 4 types of arcs. Goals Provide users with preview area Allow visitors to choose font and color Allow adding drop shadow and selecting drop shadow color Allow turning the text into arcs Real Time calculating Solution Because of the need for increasing customers interest we had to think about not for perfect math formulas when showing the graphs in the preview area, but for the people who will look at them. As we will reaveal below, there were few problems going arround human appreceptions for something 'perfectly smooth' and the matchematical perfect figures. Methodology We were going to extensively use PHP GD library for the text effects. It provided easy changing of fonts and colors, adding drop shawdows and rotating the texts. We had also to create color palletes which to appear when user click and disappear when color is selected (You can personally try the decals creating here). Using hidden layers and javascript was supposed to do the work. The main problem in this site was to create 4 types of arcs so when the user selects one of them the text is created arround imaginary arc (like in the vector graphical softwares). We were going to study Bezie's formulas and create these arcs with its help. Implementation PIM Team Bulgaria had the task to build the full functional online decals builder with the following features: - Decal background Some users were supposed to have their decals placed on colored background. We had to allow the preview area to be painted in a selected background. First we created the image in temp folder: // the name of destination image $dest='decals/'.time().'.jpg'; //the background imagefilledrectangle ( $im, '0
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