Is there a way to set an image as the background?

MDtheDM

MDtheDM

I've figured out background colors using the div tag, but can't seem to come up with the magic formula to tile a background image (I want to create pages that look like parchment). Is such a feature not supported at this time or am I just missing something(highly likely)...

FemmeLegion

IIRC that feature only works with the < body > tag, which isn't supported on this site. They're (understandably) pretty hesitant about opening up *all* the HTML tags, and even in the cases where we've changed their minds, it will take some time (see the thread in Feature Requests titled "Why Are Features Coming Along So Slowly?").

There was also some talk about asking users to design custom CSS themes (there's a thread on it *somewhere*), but I also don't think that has gone anywhere yet.

ChainsawXIV

You can do this using in-line CSS. In your opening DIV tag, add a *style* property that looks like this:

style="background-image:url('http://www.yourhost.com/folder/filename.jpg');"

Note that you will need to get your image hosted somewhere online for this (or any other means, really), and replace the file path in my example there with the correct address. I don't really have any suggestions as far as that goes, but I'm sure there are some cheep or free solutions to be found out there.

ChainsawXIV

If you want to get fancy, you could also use a table to make an expanding parchment text box, like -this demo- I cooked up. The setup for this is a lot more complex, but you can just copy and paste it from the page (though please host the images on your own space, if you can).

If very many people decide to use this, let me know. I can spend more than 15 minutes on the graphics and make them look a lot better.

Edit: You can find an example template for this on my "template page":http://www.obsidianportal.com/campaign/sanction/wikis/templates now. I'm doing a little cleaning up and wanted to get rid of the original example page.

MDtheDM

Fantastic! Thanks for the help and suggestions. I'm a novice with textile / html / CSS but I'm happy with what I've created so far. This will make my presentation look much better. (Understandable re: the images. I have all of my images hosted elsewhere. Thanks again!)

Antisoul

You could also lay out your site using tables

In this piece of shit service's infinite wisdom they've graced us with the privilege, nay the honor! Of utilizing the tag in our paid for blogs, they have also been so generous as to allow that tag and the tags and to be styled even! Oh what wondrous customization options we have here!

Soooo... you could put what you want your page to look like 'graphically speaking' into a layered photoshop image, slice it up and save all the images as web friendly .png files (since you'll get transparency that way), then make a table with the same number of rows and columns, style the table to be the proper size and knock out its margin, border, and padding by styling them to be 0px and then adding the almighty '!important' tag to the end of the inline style which will tell the site that you're inline style should take precedence over any other style effectively overwriting the crappy css on this web-site, do the same thing for each table row and table data tag ( and ) place tags inside the tags, and style them to have the appropriate width/height as your images and table cells, again knock out all the borders margins and padding. the result will be you're original design that you drew up in photoshop and chopped all to pieces being pieced back together without this web-pages irritating border and padding and margin styles (since we overlaid them with our own more '!important' ones.)

do a google search for web layout slicing

ChainsawXIV

Whenever you're working within the framework of an existing site, you're going to have to make some allowances for the formatting that the site itself uses. They have to use the same techniques to create that framework, after all. CSS is designed with that in mind however - you're inline styles will override their page wide styles, without need for the _!important_ tag you mentioned. Doing everything inline can be a bit of a pain, but it's not the end of the world.

In any case, slices are a workable option if you want to go that way. My original example of how to do this basically took that approach. I've found that there's often a simpler way of achieving the same effect on here, though.

Antisoul

Eh, either way I'm dropping the service. IMO the formatting options are both a pain to work with and hideously lacking in customization options, the kind of functionality I found available with the ascendant subscription is of a quality I would expect even free services to surpass by at least a leap if not also bounds. So I'd rather spend the $5 on a pack of cigarettes and learn php, pearl or asp.net and host something for my players on the domain I run.