Clippings

If you have Drag-and-Drop support on your machine, you can drag clipping files of open images out of DropImage to use in other applications.  This is very useful if you want to use a clipping in another application that supports drag and drop but has no support for an image in a certain file format.  Just click on the image preview and drag to the desktop or another application window to create a Macintosh image clipping file.

If you drag the image off the image preview to the desktop while holding the option key, you will create a Macintosh text clipping file containing the HTML described below instead.

You can also copy the image clipping to the clipboard using the "Copy PICT" button at the bottom-left of the window.

The "Copy HTML" button at the bottom-left of the window is of use to web authors who want to quickly know the size of an image for creating and editing web pages.  When you click this button, the HTML source for the image with WIDTH and HEIGHT tags is copied to the clipboard.  Example generated HTML:

<IMG SRC="cnnin.logo.gif" WIDTH="125" HEIGHT="76">

In the Preferences menu item (in the File menu), there are several options that allow you to affect the contents of the HTML clipping generated.

1) If you enable "Add ALT Tag", the clipping will add the following to the HTML:

ALT="alt-text"

where "alt-text" is the text in the ALT-TAG preferences box.

2) If you enable "Add Border", the clipping will add the following to the HTML:

BORDER="0" 

3) If you enter text into the "Image Path" field, the clipping will prepend the image path to the SRC variable.  For example, if I typed "images/" into the image path, the HTML would be as follows:

<IMG SRC="images/cnnin.logo.gif" WIDTH="125" HEIGHT="76" BORDER="0">

4) Finally, if you enable the "Use Relative Paths" option, DropImage adopts a more sophisticated behavior.  Here is an example.  Let's say my web site is located on my local computer at Hard Drive:Web:public html, and in that folder there is a folder called new_images.  In images is an image file called cnnin.logo.gif.  

Thus, the full path to the image is:

Hard Drive:Web:public html:new_images:cnnin.logo.gif

We want the public html folder to serve as the "base" of our web site.  To do this, we drag the folder public html to the "Image Path" text field in the preferences dialog, and its path is auto-typed into the field.  We then turn on "Use Relative Paths" and save the preferences.  Now, when we drop the image on DropImage and copy the clipping, we get the following:

<IMG SRC="new_images/cnnin.logo.gif" WIDTH="125" HEIGHT="76">

This is not as complicated as it sounds.  If this new feature doesn't make sense to you, don't enable the "Relative Paths" option and DropImage will behave exactly as it did in previous versions.