| Simon Lord 2005-05-29, 5:45 pm |
| Ok, I admit I saw Stefan's email then realized I had forgotten to
release the *font* based smilies solution I promised a few weeks ago.
The delay was due to a number of things dealing with clients and with
the font itself, hopefully I can detail some of the font smilie
*issues* in an article to be posted on Stefan's website in the near
future.
But before I get buried in work I just wanted to get this out to you
guys now. So here is a sample fla file with BOTH the PC and MAC
truetype smilie font:
http://www.karbonized.com/smilies/Archive.zip
.... you can alternatively test it online here:
http://www.karbonized.com/smilies
.... hit the "Chat Test" tab to test it in a chat style environment. If
you stick to the "Preview" tab, which is the default page when it
loads, you will see a number of fields:
- smilie
- smilie characters
- font representations using verdana
- html required to draw loaded smilie
I'll get in touch with Stefan and see about a preliminary article to
explain what the font is and how it works. My hope is that someone
more talented creatively can pump out several font sets based on this
initial work so we can all get robust smilies in chat. Note that this
method does not mean we are limited to smilies, we can effectively
create graphics that resemble buttons ie "Cancel", "Enter", "Link" etc
and use the asfunction and hyperlinks to make these font smilies more
interactive. I'm just sorry I don't have the time to create those
samples for you all.
PS: The original release had a problem whereby some smilies would
completely obliterate previous smilies in the chat. Sometimes smilies
would seemingly loose their eyes, mouths etc. I finally located that
issue which is caused by the font colour. If you overlap two
characters in a font (within flash) within a text field then the
intersecting portions of those fonts create some kind of boolean and
the overlapping sections simply disappear. Since the trick with this
font is to effectively draw several characters one each above the other
to create the face I had to be careful not to use the same colour for
DIFFERENT elements. For example, the base smilie (yellow) uses the
same colours over and over. If however, I where to use the SAME colour
assignment to a new set of eyes that is also used in the base smilie
then those eyes would effectively disappear in favour of the base area
which is already using that colour.
Hopefully that was clear as mud, if you did understand then you'll be
able to create a few dozen variations of smilies from this set on your
own. Use the "Preview" portion of my included fla to see the
independent shapes to all the smilies to build your own (it's a pain).
See the sendMessage function in the privChat component for code, you
can create your own smilie codes VERY easily.
If time permits, an article will follow shortly.
PSPS: Since this is a font based solution to the smilie problem, it
should be easy to incorporate them into Flash 6 apps or into MS word
docs etc.
Sincerely,
Simon
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