How do I print rotated content (divs) in IE8? The DXImageTranform filter options do not appear to be printable.
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms533014(v=vs.85)
Just to put this into context. I'm writing a pure dom-based canvas library called simpleCanvas. I am desperately trying to offer rotation of text, rectangles and images in IE8 without using a VML fallback, because it's ugly and slow, and error prone. A VML fallback is on my todo list as I concede that it's the only way I know how to do this in IE8 without additional tools. I'm hoping that there is some trick that I'm missing that doesn't come with a third party or server side requirement. If you have found it, a bounty is coming your way.
This is a massive stretch but is the best idea I could come up with:
Explorer Canvas - https://code.google.com/p/explorercanvas/ - Implements the canvas in IE8 by abusing VML.
HTML2Canvas - http://html2canvas.hertzen.com/ - Can render your document onto a canvas, which can then be rotated.
Failing that, I suspect your only option is going to be to generate a rotated document server-side and give that to the client for printing.
Edit: One other last ditch would be to handle the printing via Silverlight, embedding the page in a browsercontrol inside silverlight (yuck), rotating that and printing the result via SL.
Really grasping at straws here though for anything client side in a legacy browser.
According to Printing webpage with rotated text in Internet Explorer 9 you need to use -ms-transform too. Be sure to read the EDIT too as there is something buggy.
Would https://developers.google.com/chrome/chrome-frame/ be acceptable? I'm guessing not if its a LOB application, but it'd give you the features you need without taking the user out of IE8 in the strictest sense. Just another avenue to explore.
https://code.google.com/p/jqueryrotate/ - This will rotate images, it uses VML to do it in IE8. The caveat is that any text you wanted to rotate would have to be as an image.
I've never used it and it would be some work but have you tried svgweb? Basically it uses SVG if the browser supports it and Flash if it doesn't. Because it's a flash object you can print it like an image once rendered.
Here's a few more demos of it: svgweb Demos
Related
I am doing some pre-production on a project that requires drawing on a 3d canvas, which I think flash is the best way to go. But there is a chance down the line that this client might want the site to show up on the ipad, iphone or other mobile devices that don't support flash.
So I was playing with the idea of doing everything in html and javascript except for the actual drawing/3D area. Almost like using flash as the element. I think html5 is too premature to start using this, but might be beneficial down the line. Chances are I will just go the entire flash route, but I thought it would be interesting to try.
Anyway, my question is pretty top level. 1) how hard would it be to drag an object from an html page using javascript, and dropping it into the flashplayer. And then manipulating it from there.
Are there any examples out there that have tried to do this?
Communication between Flash and an HTML page requires the use of ExternalInterface. That's a good place to start. These guys seem to have figured out some of the details.
As far as the iPad and iPhone are concerned, Flash just ain't gonna happen.
However, I don't think it's fair to say HTML5 is "too premature". Lots of people are doing lots of cool things with the canvas element. You could too. :)
I am using Large fonts in my website at a few places and they don't appear anti-aliased or smooth... I was wondering if their is any way to show large anti-aliased fonts for browsers on windows OS which has anti-aliasing switched off as default... Similar to something they have on this website here
You can't control system anti-alias in CSS.
For that, you would have to use Flash text replacement, like sIFR (they are using h2swf)
If the user's OS or browser does not have anti-alias switched on, there's nothing you can do to force either to use it. You can use other rendering platforms like Flash, or using CCS to replace text with images, to allow fonts to be displayed with anti-aliasing, but it does seem like a kludge for something as simple as rendering text. Technologies like Flash will also alienate certain audiences, either whose devices have no support for them or they simply opt out of using them.
If your user does not have AA enabled, arguably they are displaying a preference or simply don't care about the particulars of how the font is rendered. At the end of the day, you simply cannot directly control the client your users will use to consume your website. On the web you will always be at the mercy of the client application. The best you can do is present it clearly and in such a way that it should be easy for users to get the best experience they can achieve with their client.
Don't lose any sleep over whether your pixels are slightly less pretty on one client.
Cufon is an alternative to sIFR. See comparison here:
http://net.tutsplus.com/tutorials/html-css-techniques/six-ways-to-improve-your-web-typography/
Good news : in IE9 (released 3/14/11) they seem to put much larger text as anti aliased by default. I have hardware acceleration disabled - so it probably has this effect for all users.
Warning: this is an exercise in futility but....
I did notice that the text-shadow css property seems to force anti aliasing in some browsers. Unfortunately I think only Chrome at this time...
Here's a sample...
(each heading is shown first normally - and then with a text shadow).
Best viewed in Chrome!
What is the best cross-browser way to get a flat mouse coordinate input data and simple callback for mouse events for my rectangular game area on my web page, even when it has loads of larger and smaller images and text string overlaid haphazard onto it?
And what is the best way to insert or remove a text string or semi-transparent image overlay at an arbitrary location (and Z order, specified relative to existing objects) in a board game rectangle with cross-browser DHTML?
And how can I stop the user selecting part or all of my montage of images (I just want them to interact with it as if it was Flash), and can I stop the right click menus coming up in IE, FF etc?
I want to do this without Flash because I want something that will work both on desktops and on iPhone and potentially other mobile platforms too.
I appreciate there are serious limitations (eg less image scaling capabilities, not vector, no rotation capability) to what I can do if I'm not using Flash but I'm very interested to know what capabilities are available.
Are there perhaps any frameworks available to make it easier than coding from scratch?
Would J/Query be a good match for some of the requirements? What else do I need?
I would recommend Google Web Toolkit. It lets you program in Java, which gives you all the type-safety and nice IDE functionality that Java entails, but compiles to Javascript so that you can just run it in a browser. It also does a ton of optimization and supports tons of features.
jQuery is excellent at doing this. I used jQuery's UI and Ajax functionality to implement the frontend for a game of chess.
I made it a little easier by creating an 8-by-8 table with unique div names for each tile, so Javascript can access them by getting the elements by id. If you can't create something like that, you do have the option of placing elements anywhere on the page (either absolute or relative to a given element). You can also easily change the z-index, including when the use is dragging a piece or when they have dropped it.
As far as disable right click and item selection goes, that's something that I didn't figure out how to do. You might want to take a look at some other Ajax games like Grand Strategy, which are much more polished than my experiment and may have figured out how to do this.
There are two main APIs for working with arbitrary drawing and positioning on the web, Canvas and SVG.
Take a look at Chrome Canvas Experiments and the Raphael Javascript toolkit to see some examples and Javascript abstractions.
The key is element.style.position = 'absolute'. To illustrate just what's possible here's how far I've managed to push javascript (and from scratch at that!):
http://slebetman.110mb.com/tank3.html - RTS in DOM! Click on units/squads then click somewhere else to tell them where to go. You can control both sides.
I'm doing some animations and I want to implement something like this on the web. I was thinking that the HTML canvas can do this kind of job. Because I can scale part of an image. I just need the algorithm to actually make it work.
The effect is elastic, if the window is small, the greater the elasticity of the window when you restore it. I was thinking that I can make this work in web images.. if the user click the image it will scale with this kind of effect, not the boring way of scaling.
This is ubuntu, I know that we can look at the source code maybe to see how it actually implements the animation. But I dont know where to find it. Or i don't even understand codes written in linux because I just understand php, javascript. Basically I'm not a software developer, My core expertise is in web development.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hgQP-aFragQ
I believe your best bet is having a look at John Resig's Processing.js.
Processing is a animation language for Java; John has ported it to the browser using canvas.
Your not going to find a web based solution that is going to do this for you. If you need something like this done it will have to be in flash or some other application (Lenni mentioned Java) that runs in a separate media box embedded in a web page.
People don't want big flashy animations, seeing something that is 'boring' is much better if it becomes more usable.
First up - I don't know the actual algorithm they use here.
However, I'd attack this by creating a grid of points (say 10x10), each point attached to it's neighbors by damped springs. It might be worth anchoring the edge/corner points to the screen with springs too.
By deforming the grid (stretching and compressing the springs) and then modeling the spring responses, you'd get some interesting effects like those shown. You might then be able to record the patterns so that the points can follow a pre-computed path for faster animation if your animations are predictable.
Then you need to work out how to split the image and map it onto the grid. The splitting may be better done once on the server, but the client can do it if you use canvas.
svg & vml is a possibility - they'll work without plugins and are similar enough to code for, but I don't think you'll get correct enough image deformation. However, you can scale and rotate with impunity (and quickly) so if you just anchor 2 cell image points to the grid rather than all 4, you'll get an interesting animation - not quite like the video, but pretty good.
As for how to model damped springs, you'll need to keep track of the mass of each point (how heavy it is), how much force the spring is exerting on each point (scalar of how compressed/stretched it is and it's vector) and a damping force on the points (resistive force to the square of the velocity of the point).
It's physics modeling, to be sure, but quite possible.
The response may well be slow. Especially on IE. Canvas needs a plug-in on IE, so if you use canvas, IE folk wont see it. SVG works on almost everything except IE, but it does have VML which is similar. http://raphaeljs.com/ is a library that uses whatever's available. This will be a challenge to tune up :)
However you do this, it will always look best in chrome, the V8 javascript engine outstrips everything else for this kind of work. IE has the slowest javascript engine.
I've seen a few JavaScript image rotators that use either the HTML5 canvas element or an AJAX call to a server-side script, but is it possible to do it without using those methods? Internet Explorer doesn't support canvas (I'm aware of excanvas, but I'd like to do without if possible) and I'm not sure if AJAX will be fluid enough. If there is a way, are there any open source scripts, examples, or resources that you could point me to?
Alas, CSS does not support rotating images in any way, shape or form (unless you count CSS Transforms, which are only supported by Safari 4 and Firefox 3.1).
Your best bet is to use Raphael's image() and rotate(), which should support all semi-modern browsers (using SVG) and most versions of IE (using VML).
This jQuery plugin works in major browsers including IE: http://wilq32.googlepages.com/wilq32.rollimage222 . It makes use of excanvas, but at least it allows you to evaluate if that method is good enough for your purposes.
Yes, via CSS Transform:
var degree=180;
document.getElementById('image_name').style.transform='rotate('+degree+'deg)';
Google is your friend:
http://www.walterzorn.com/rotate_img/rotate_img.htm
But the downside of this technique (as mentioned) is that it uses hacks by inserting a huge number of DIVS so it could slow down the browser a good bit. Use with caution. Problems like this are why the canvas tag was created in the first place.