On 24 Aug 00, at 23:12, Leigh wrote:

> hi
>
> I am trying to make some text follow the irregular shape of  the visible
> part of a graphic. ie: the graphic fills the page but has many white
> areas that I want to put text into.  If I use layers I can get it
> looking fine in dreamweaver but when I change the screen resolution
> (800x600 to 480x640) and look at it in the browsers (IE & Netscape
> current versions), the text gets out of place after the change. I tried
> making the image and text into a jpeg but it was far too big even when
> optimized.
>
> I am suspecting that this is a limitation of HTML, I'd be grateful if
> anyone could offer a work around, or at the worst confirm my suspicions
> so I can stop wasting time on it!

  Well, *part* of the issue is a "limitation" of HTML.

  I put "limitation" in quotes, because it's not so much that it
CAN'T do what you want, as that its fundamental design philosophy is
incompatible with the kind of total control of presentation that you
want to exercise.
  While I cannot swear that Adobe Acrobat's .PDF format can do
exactly what you want, it at least is designed to provide authors
with total control over presentation, which would appear to be a
prerequisite to doing what you want.

  [HTML tries to establish a sort of compromise, on the fly, between
*structural* hints from the author and presentation preferences from
the viewer; it probably provides best results when each is prepared
to be pretty flexible.]

David G

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