Manufacturing Buttons in .NET framework

Printer Quick Response Code in .NET framework Manufacturing Buttons

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Creating a button image Filling the button with color Changing the button to 3-D Adding a button image

hile 13 tells you how to paint the background image for your custom browser s toolbar, it doesn t describe how to make buttons for your toolbar Your custom browser s toolbar can have buttons for the complete set of navigation controls, including Home, Back, Forward, Stop, Refresh, Search, and Favorites In this chapter, you use Paint Shop Pro to create new buttons for your browser s toolbar

Buttons may be small, but you need to take as much care in their creation as you would with larger images, such as toolbars And, just as with toolbars or other images, you first need to start your button with a new blank image of the correct size and color depth Here are the attributes for a button: Width of 32 pixels Height of 32 pixels Resolution of 200 pixels per centimeter Color depth of 16 million colors (24-bit color) If you create your browser s button image with a different size or resolution, you may see some distortion when you load it into your browser This is because the browser automatically resizes the image to fit the buttons in your toolbar

A new button starts with a blank image, which has the attributes described in the previous section Here s a step-by-step guide to creating a button: 1 Choose File New The New Image dialog box, shown in Figure 15-1, appears

2 Using the drop-down list, set the Units box to Pixels 3 Change Width to 32 4 Change Height to 32 5 Set Resolution to 200 Pixels/cm This option is probably already set to this value 6 Make sure that the Raster Background option is selected You want the raster background, rather than the vector background, because you won t be using vector graphics (independently manipulated graphic objects) when you create browser graphics 7 Set the Color Depth box to 16 Million Colors Again, this option is probably already set to this value 8 Make sure that the Color box is set to white and the Transparent option is not selected

The Transparent option specifies an image with no background color You want a background color of white, so you want transparency off 9 Click OK Paint Shop Pro creates a blank image for your new button 10 Save your work Choose File Save to save your work If the Save As dialog box appears, give the image a filename and select the type of image format you want to use I suggest that you save your browser graphics in the jpg format

If you followed the steps in the preceding section, your new button ended up pretty small A small image like this one can be hard to work with Luckily, Paint Shop Pro enables you to magnify the image so that you can better see what you re doing with it To make your new button easier to see and work with, perform these steps: 1 Click the Pan tool in Paint Shop Pro s toolbox It s the topmost tool, the one that looks like an arrow mouse cursor The tool s settings appear in Paint Shop Pro s toolbar, as shown in Figure 15-2

2 To zoom by a user-defined amount, type a value into the Zoom box in the Pan tool s settings, as shown in Figure 15-3; to zoom a predefined amount, click either the Zoom By 1 Step or the Zoom By 5 Steps buttons If you re typing a value, keep in mind that this number is a percentage; values below 100 decrease the magnification, whereas values above 100 increase the magnification If you click the 5+ button twice, Paint Shop Pro magnifies your button image by a factor of ten 3 Save your work