Find or create an appropriate image and place it in the same directory in Java

Maker PDF 417 in Java Find or create an appropriate image and place it in the same directory

It s easiest if the image is in the same directory as the page If that s the case, you can simply type the image name Make sure you surround the URL with quotes

browser A lot can go wrong with background images The image may not be in the right directory, you might have misspelled its name, or you may have forgotten the url() bit (I do all those things sometimes)

It s pretty easy to add backgrounds, but background images aren t perfect Figure 4-9 demonstrates a page with a nice background Unfortunately, the text is difficult to read

Figure 4-9: The text is very hard to read Don t do this to your users!

Background images can add a lot of zing to your pages, but they can introduce some problems, such as: Background images can add to the file size Images are very large, so a big background image can make your page much larger and harder to download Some images can make your page harder to read An image in the background can interfere with the text, so the page can be much harder to read Good images don t make good backgrounds A good picture draws the eye and calls attention to it The job of a background image is to fade into the background If you want people to look at a picture, embed it Background images shouldn t jump into the foreground Backgrounds need to be low contrast If your background image is dark, you can make light text viewable If the background image is light, dark text shows up If your image has areas of light and dark (like nearly all good images), it ll be impossible to find a text color that looks good against it

Web developers have come up with a number of solutions to background image issues over the years I used several of these solutions in the backgroundImagehtml page (the readable one shown in Figure 4-8)

If you try to create an image the size of an entire Web page, the image will be so large that dialup users will almost never see it Even with compression techniques, a page-sized image is too large for quick or convenient loading Fortunately, you can use a much smaller image and fool the user into thinking it takes up the entire screen Figure 4-10 shows the ropeBGjpg that I used to cover the entire page

Image courtesy of Julian Burgess (Creative Commons License)

I used a specially-created image for the background Even though it s only 500 pixels wide by 500 pixels tall, it s been carefully designed to repeat so you can t see the seams If you look carefully, you can tell that the image repeats, but you can t tell exactly where one copy ends and the next one begins This type of image is a tiled background or sometimes a seamless texture

If you want an image that repeats seamlessly, you have two main options: Find an image online A number of sites online have free seamless backgrounds for you to use on your site Try a search and see what you come up with Make your own image If you can t find a pre-made image that does what you want, you can always make your own All the main image editing tools have seamless background tools In GIMP, choose Filters Map Make Seamless You can also do it by hand by offsetting the image (choose Layer Transform Offset Offset by x/2, y/2) and using the Blur or Clone tools to clean up the seams By default, a background image repeats as many times as necessary in both the horizontal and vertical dimensions to fill up the entire page This fills the entire page with your background, but you only have to download a small image