Hey, Im sorry if this is the wrong place, but this is the closest fit I could find.

Im making a website for a gaming guild, and Im trying to make auto-resizing text boxes for announcements
Ex: http://truly.f2g.net/site.jpg (look at the thing I circled in the red).

And I have all the individual pieces needed to make it (http://truly.f2g.net/text/), the only problem is that I dont know how :P. I can get it to work by resizing the picture everytime, but that obviously makes the picture really bad. Ive talked to a couple ppl, non of whome who come up with a solution, they though maybe php/java would be the only way around this.

Again thats where I run into a problem cuz I dont know PHP, and I just started teaching myself Java, so if anyone could help me out that would be great.

thnx,
Truly

Truly,

Are you saying that textbox is actually an image? If so, I don't know of any easy way to quickly change images, although you should take a look at PHP's image editing library -- I believe it is called GD. I've never used it but I've heard others in the forums discussing it. Perhaps it will allow you to dynamically create the images you need and still allow for good text formatting.

well what would you suggest then, cuz yeh at the moment, the frame of the box would be made out of jpegs or some other format. and i dont no how i would do that :P

There is also a package out there called ImageMagik (I believe that's how it's spelled). It is a command-line interface for doing image manipulation. Google it to see what you can find -- maybe others know a bit about how easy it is to use. But I know it has the capability to do what you need.

yeh but with this, wont i have to re-make the frame everytime? isnt there any other way besides editing the picture?

You could lay down a blank image as either a table background image or use a CSS z-layer to lay the text over it.

ok sry for still buggin u bout this, but i promise this will be the last time :P. I got a new idea for how to do this using css, but Im to much of a newb to pull it off . I have the basic done, I was wondering if you could tell me what Im still doing wrong, besides the fact that the bottom part has green in it.

Also I was wandering if there was a way to force text to go where you want. Kind of like mapping, where you tell it the coordinates you want it to go at.

Thnx

Truly,

To make it the background of a table cell, for example:

<td style="background: url('Images/mybackground.jpg');"><span style="font: bold 10pt Arial; color: rgb(255,240,240);">This is my text that I want to appear over the image.</span></td>

The only thing about this solution is that you need to make sure you don't put so much text there as to cause the table cell to expand beyond the size of the image in the background.

As for dictating the coordinates of text to appear on a page, yes, you can with absolute positioning:

<div style="position: absolute; top: 200px; left: 140px;">My text will appear 200 pixels down and 140 pixels over.</div>

But CSS-P (CSS positioning) is a complex topic and so you need to read up a bit on that. It's not always as simple as that, particularly if you are dealing with child blocks, etc.

Hope this helps.

ok i have everything setup the way i want if (for now ), but is there anyways to get rid of that white space between the top picture, and the table bg?

Truly,

Went back to your URL to see what you were describing, but the link is now offline......

o sry, try this http://truly.f2g.net/text/test2