Limited Fonts in ‘Create Web Photo Gallery’

NB
Posted By
Neville_Burbeck
Oct 20, 2003
Views
405
Replies
8
Status
Closed
I am new to Photoshop Elements 2.0 and wondered if there is any way to increase the number of fonts available when creating text when using ‘Create Web Photo Gallery’. I’m running under Win Me/512mb/AMD2400+. It seems only Arial/Courier New/Helvetica/Times/Time New Roman are available in the Font dropdown although I have many more installed in Windows and available under other products. Any pionters would be appreciated. Other than editing the generated HTML source you can’t even set Bold/Italics in the generated text, just change font size, and thought I could use a bolder font to circumvent this limitation.
Cheers,
Nev

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Bob_E._Warren
Oct 20, 2003
The gallery function writes HTML. This means that for text you can only use standard browser fonts. To get a different appearance, you would have to create the text as an image in Elements, then insert it into the HTML code after gallery has generated it.

Bob Warren
NB
Neville_Burbeck
Oct 20, 2003
Thanks, Bob. I understand that there are standard fonts that everyone gets, but it is possible to set the HTML entry to something like
” which would select the heavier arial font if it were installed on the client system. The problem is that only the limited five fonts are listed in elements and you can’t select any others you have installed even if you wanted to. It would be useful if you could just set ‘bold/italic/normal’ somewhere as that would then negate the need to try fonts that are not on everyone’s box.
You’re right, in order to get the look right 100% of the time I’d have to create an image with the font I wanted and them embed that – but what a pain to do when the wizard creates so many files! Still I suppose that’s getting too far into an HTML editor rather than a photo editor.
Thanks again,
Nev
NB
Neville_Burbeck
Oct 20, 2003
OOps, I inserted a HTML string and it created the message in Arial Bold – didn’t mean to shout, sorry! The string had face ‘=’ arial bold in it…
TW
Tony_Weisse
Oct 20, 2003
Neville,

I have done some playing around with the web gallery feature and created a couple of templates for my own use (headings, borders, icons, etc.). I’m at work right now and can’t recall all the details, but I’m sure you can create templates that use any font you want to. It’s easier to work on the templates themselves because then you don’t have to go through and edit every single HTML document that gets generated. I’ll check on some examples and post later.

Tony
MM
Mac_McDougald
Oct 20, 2003
…if you could just set ‘bold/italic/normal’

<FONT FACE="Arial, Helvetica, (etc)">

Is the standard way of calling for different fonts, in order of preference.

The main prob is that if you use fonts of substantially different widths, the page layout will change significantly.

For example, "Comic Sans, Times New Roman" will *really* look different. The other universal prob is that the fonts one might expect to be on a Windows machine won’t likely be on a Macintosh.

Of course, on any platform, the user has the option of overriding ALL the font calls with his browser settings, too.

Cascading style sheets (CSS) is one (complicated) way around this to a certain extent.

Mac
NB
Neville_Burbeck
Oct 21, 2003
Thanks for the comments everyone. I’ll look forward to seeing your examples Tony. I’ll see what I can cobble together to get what I want.
Cheers, Nev
TW
Tony_Weisse
Oct 26, 2003
Neville,

Sorry I didn’t reply sooner. It’s been a hellish week at work and I finally had a chance to review. Sorry to say that what I have done with the Web pages isn’t quite what you’re looking for. That is, I didn’t change the fonts on the drop-down. The method I used was to create new templates and "hard code" some of the characteristics such as font style. In addition, this lets you utilize your own images, set up rollovers, etc. I am not very good with html and don’t have the interest to take the concept very far. The advantage of creating a custom template is that you only have to edit the handful of template html files rather than the (potentially) dozens of files that could get created.

Open a file browser. You will find the web templates in Elements (wherever that’s installed for you) -> Presets -> WebContactSheet. You should immediately recognize the folder names as web templates. Pick one that has the general characteristics that you want (image placement, frames and the like). Make a copy of it and name it whatever you want. I would suggest something like "Neville’s Really Cool Web". Keep it in the same directory or Elements won’t be able to find it! Typically you will end up with 4 or 5 html files and a sub-folder called "images". Open up Elements and verify that you can see your template.

Now you’re all set to go. You can directly edit the html files to alter the style accordingly. The plug-in uses the "%" to indicate variable information that comes from your screen choices. I just went ahead and set these up to use a specific font, style, etc. You may have to do this in more than one of the template html files. Images are all kept in the the images folder, so go ahead and make your own arrows, etc. and put them into place. I even did some with animated gifs and rollovers.

Like I said, you don’t get the flexibility of choosing at the time of creation, but you can do a lot to customize the templates to your needs.

Tony
NB
Neville_Burbeck
Nov 4, 2003
Tony,
Thanks again. I’ll have a go creating an updated template instead…

Nev

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