HTML Tools
Free for all! What does HTML stand for? High Technology Machine Language Highlight Text Much Later HyperText Markup Language Hamburger with Tomatoes, Mustard and Lettuce I quite like the sound of number four but as everyone knows it's actually number . . . . Maybe you have a basic understanding of HTML (Hyper Text Markup Language ) but could do with a little help with the Tags or with the graphics. Or maybe you're just tired of the sheer drudgery of putting it all together. I hope PC Plus can help you out with this formidable collection of HTML tools. There's everything from GIF cleaners to HTML formatters, in fact everything to make you and your Web page sing and dance, but best of all they are completely free!
Tag along with me honey . . . HTML Tag Buddy v2.99 (892 Kb) Win95
We start off with HTML Tag Buddy which helps a Web developer deal with the tedious HTML jargon associated with the link, body, colour, font, frame, image, list, META and table Tags. It enables you to easily create image and other Tags without having to know everything about them. There are in fact, hundreds of programs that will do the same, but none combine them like this one. In fact, the advanced features on the META Tag generator can only be found elsewhere in full commercial packages. HTML Tag Buddy will save your settings between sessions - such as name, e-mail address and background colour. This is the 'just released' new version of HTML Buddy - the main screen has been re-designed to make it a look a little different and the Name and Target has also been added to the Image Tag Buddy. A smaller program which contains only the Color Tag Buddy is available at the HTML Tag Buddy HomePage. Please note: this program needs a screen resolution of 800 x 600 or above to run correctly.   Abstractamation Mcatis (1.31 Mb) Win95/98/NT Mcatis is a fully-featured Meta Tag generator for Windows 95/98/NT. It creates Meta Tags that can be inserted into Web pages. These Meta Tags can improve your site's ranking in Web indexes, search engines and also make it much easier for Web surfers to find relevant information. A picture paints a thousand words . . . Do you want to add excitement to your Web pages? XOOM.com. has a fantastic collection of 250,000 Web clips. The XOOM.com Web Clip Empire 250,000 is a 12 CD collection and, it's jam-packed with high-quality clips to make your Web pages come alive! PCPlus has negotiated a special deal where we will be including over 2,000 specially picked graphics taken from this collection, this month and the following months to come. By the end you will have quite a varied and diverse selection of clip-art which is yours to keep Royalty free, no strings attached. Click here if you want to know more. Ulead GIF Animator Lite (1.74 Mb) Win95 NT 4 GIF animations can be a double-edged sword: while they are great in terms of compatibility and can really make a difference, but can lead to very large file sizes. The trick is to use as few frames as possible while still generating the effect of movement. Using too many on the same page means that they can distract the visitor from the original page content. Saying that - animated GIFs still have their place and do help to bring a Web Page 'alive', which is why Ulead GIF Animator Lite Edition has been included in HTML Tools this month. This Lite Edition is designed to give you a taste of the industry standard for GIF animators. It is available for unlimited use and enables you to create animated GIFs easily and quickly. Please note: needs 256 colours to run. Several 'Wizards' are featured, including: Add Banner Text Add Simple Transition Add Colour Animation Add Cube Effect The GIF Animation Collection Personal Edition (3.74 Mb) Win95 NT 4 450 professionally designed GIF animations. Install the whole set right into your system. The GIF Animation Collection Personal Edition is for personal Web sites only. The use of these animations for any other purpose is prohibited. PhotoImpact Viewer v4.0 (1.93 Mb) Win95/NT 3.51 Another beauty from Ulead and just because it's freeware it doesn't mean it's not the best image viewer on the market! Photo Viewer 4.0 offers an unbeatable range of features, while the most commonly used functions are just a mouse click away. View and convert more than 27 image types: CBMP, CLP, CUR, EPS, FAX, GIF, ICO, JPG (JPEG), IMG, MAC, PCD, PCT, PCX, PIC, PNG, PSD, RAS, RLE, SCT, SHG, TGA, TIF (TIFF) and WMF - to name but a few! View GIF animations, display multiple images, rotate and pan, print, or open into your favourite image editor. Easily configurable for common applications, you can set any image type to automatically open to Photo Viewer when you double-click it in Windows. With its intuitive interface and seamless integration into Windows, you'll use Viewer every day without even realising it. ShoeString's PictureDicer v0.39 (512 Kb) Win95/98/NT PictureDicer is a freeware tool that chops any image file into several smaller images, suitable for creating 'mouseover' effects and pseudo-imagemaps on Web pages. It also generates the HTML for a table to contain the partial images and display them so they appear as the original uncut image. This effect was also aided by ImageButton Applet PictureDicer accepts and outputs the following file formats: .BMP, .DIB, .GIF, .JPG, .PCX, .TGA and .TIF. Please note: If you start with an existing .JPG, there will be some degradation of image quality in the resulting output. This is unavoidable, so it's recommended that you never start from a JPG, but save the output of your picture in .BMP, .TGA or .TIF format. The program also does not accept greyscale JPG. Beautifully arranged . . . PRETTY HTML v1.01 (1.08 Mb) Win95/98/NT PRETTY HTML is a fast and useful tool for Web page developers. Compress your HTML code (save up to 20-30 per cent disk space and so increase the speed of your Web site), or properly outline your code for better readability, without changing the page appearance in a Web browser. Who needs the format option? Anyone who . . . Is using WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) HTML editors. They often produce a very unreadable code. Is too busy to outline self-written HTML code manually. Wants to study or analyse other peoples (often unformatted) HTML code. Wants to give his customer a well outlined and readable code. Wants to edit a clear code in a text editor. Who needs the compress option? Anyone who . . . Wants to save local disk space. Wants to save provider disk space. Wants to reduce traffic volume. Wants to increase the speed of a Web site. Wants to help their visitors save time and money. To install simply double click on the file which will unzip to the default directory normally - C:\WINDOWS\TEMP unless otherwise instructed. Leaner and cleaner . . . GIFClean32 v 2.5 (349 Kb) Win95 While we are on the subject of faster download times I would like to turn your attention to GIFClean32. GIF image files contain a number of internal structures. These structures govern how the GIF is displayed, the looping counter, delay times and so on. There are also a number of comment and application extension structures. Comments and non-Netscape application extensions take up space and cause some delay in loading a GIF file to your Web page. Some GIF image editors and animation tools place a number of comments and their own application extensions. These extensions are not used by Netscape or Internet Explorer and can be safely removed without affecting the functionality of the GIF or animated GIF file. Space saving from 100 bytes to over 1K can be realised by cleansing animated GIF files. Although GIFClean is freeware you are asked to register the use of it on-line. if you are unable to do this you are also given the option of saving the details (name and so on) in a file on the hard drive (which you promise faithfully to send later, don't you)! The 'Please Register' nag screen will then disappear!  A Square Image (570 Kb) Win95 A Square Image is a freeware application for easily reducing/cropping/padding an image to a (square) target size.The simple visual one-screen interface provides an intuitive (even fun) image editing experience. It is particularly useful for processing and editing digital images and photos. As you can see by the examples the end results are exceptionally clear without any picture loss. To install simply double click on the file which will unzip to the default directory normally - C:\unzipped unless otherwise instructed. To remove the package, delete the folder from your hard drive. View the License. View theReadMe file. ORIGINAL PADDED CROPPED Morning campers . . . Web Marquee Wizard (1.95 Mb) Win95/NT 4 Using the Wizard is very simple and is similar to many other 'wizard' programs you may have encountered before. To start the program, open the Start menu and click Programs. Then click on the Web Marquee Wizard entry. The program will then load and you will be presented with the initial screen. To begin, press the Next button at the bottom of the window. At each step you will be required to set various options, which are explained onscreen. To skip to a step, click on the relevant name in the area on the left. If you change your mind at any point, just skip to the required step, or press the 'Back' button. On the last step, if you want to preview your marquee's HTML code, then click the button onscreen. A window will appear showing the HTML code - this is what you will have to paste into your Web page. To close it and return to the last step, just click the 'X' button at the top-right of the window. When creating your marquees, try and choose contrasting colours (for example, white text on a black background) for the text and background colours as this will make it easier to read. Also, try to refrain from using colours that are very bright or dark (unless that is the look you're trying to achieve), as this can be hard to read as well. The visitors to your Web site will thank you if you follow this advice ... In order for your readers to see the Marquee effect, they will have to be using Microsoft Internet Explorer 2 or above. If the readers of your pages are browsing using Netscape Navigator/Communicator (or any other browser that doesn't support marquees), then it will appear as standard text, retaining the text colour that you've set but not the background colour. Come back and see me some time . . . World Engine v3.0 ( Kb) Win95/98 What makes a Web page worth coming back to again? Correct HTML coding? Well, maybe. Pretty pictures? That depends. The Webmasters life story and photograph album - definitely not! It is content, the little touches that make the difference between an ordinary Web site and a GREAT Web site. One thing you should defiantly include is a Java search engine. The program included on the SuperCD is simply called 'World Engine' and it lives up to its name - small, unobtrusive, attractive and very useful. World Engine enables your visitors to search at 160 engines all over the world. Give 'em what they want and keep 'em coming back for more! To install, copy the directory features/htmltool/gratis/worldeng/ to your hard drive and open up the preview.html in Internet Explorer. When testing the WorldEngine applet make sure that the worldengine.class and any GIF files are installed in the same directory as the HTML file. Please note: In order to use World Engine you have to be connected to the internet. Button up . . . ImageButton Applet v1.3 ( Kb) Win95 This is a java applet for implementing a simple push button. It requires only one image to be passed as a parameter. It then creates the border and the greyscale images on its own, saving you precious server space! To install, copy the directory features/htmltool/gratis/imagebut/ to your hard drive and open up the readme.html in Internet Explorer. When testing the Image Button applet make sure that both class files (GrayFilter.class & ImageButton.class) and any sound files are installed in the same directory as the HTML file. To remove the package, delete the folder from your hard drive. This applet was used on this page in conjunction with ShoeString's PictureDicer to create a marvelous 'mouse over' effect press here to see the example. Further examples of ImageButton Applet - simple button. - button with greying and sound. - button with two images, animation and sound. - same as above, but without animation. - button with greying, two images, animation and sound. Hallelujah I'm converted . . . Text2Web v1.3.6 ( Kb) Win95 Text-to-Web Pro is a 32-bit tool to convert text documents to html format. It incorporates integrated clipboard support which provides an almost seamless operation for Web authors who want to include snippets of text (formatted or unformatted) into their Web pages. Main Features: · Operate in either command-line or interactive mode. · HTML formatting handles line and column sensitive text (such as lists and tables). · Now generates true HTML lists. · Select font face and size. · Integrated clipboard support. · Generate free-standing Web page or convert text snippets for insertion into an existing HTML document. Command-line Operation: Usage: Txt2Web Filename (where Filename is the full-name of the text file to be converted). Output filename is automatically assigned as: Filename.html. If you want to change the options, run it interactively first and make the appropriate selections. All options are inherited when running in command-line mode. Interactive Mode: To run in the interactive mode run Txt2Web.exe without any parameters. Special Requirements: VB40032.DLL available separately on the SuperCD. View the ReadMe file. That's all for this month folks! Kate Hadley