Monday, October 29, 2012

rounded buttons

Say you want some rounded buttons on a webpage, and you make your buttons in Powerpoint because you don't know what else to do. You may run in to problems for cropping those rounded buttons because most crop programs make only exact rectangles.

Here is a solution:

  1. Make the buttons in Powerpoint (or Illustrator)
  2. If you made them in powerpoint, screenshot a high resolution version (I did this from opening a PDF saved from the Powerpoint in Illustrator.)
  3. Open screenshot in Photoshop. (mine was a .png)
  4. Press "C" to open the crop tool and crop close in to the button, then press "return" to crop.
  5. If your button is outlined, press "W" for the wand tool and click to outline the surrounding area outside the button.
  6. With the outside area highlighted, press "delete"
  7. Save for a web device, GIF, transparency "background color" (this will make the area around the button transparent so you can have rounded buttons)
Here's an example of the result:

remove unwanted link underlining

Some website templates will automatically underline any links you have, even image links, which is a little unsightly.

You can get rid of it by surrounding the image with a div style tag:

<div style="text-decoration: none;"> </div>

And to display greater than or less than signs in html (like above) you can use &lt; and &gt;

Monday, October 22, 2012

TeX stack exchange

What are all of these sites, too many to keep track of:

http://tex.stackexchange.com/

This is a collaboratively edited question and answer site for users of TeX, LaTeX, ConTeXt, and related typesetting systems. Posts 4, 12, 18, 18, and 19 minutes ago...

Thursday, October 4, 2012

software carpentry

This site is designed to "help scientists be more productive by teaching them basic computing skills."

http://software-carpentry.org/

It looks potentially super useful. There are MATLAB, python, and versioning sections, among many others.