Need script to show garment embroidery

[jsinger]

We sell custom embroidered golf shirts and similar items.

I'm looking for a way for a customer to enter his name (and perhaps another line of text) in a text box and have it show up in the proper choice of color and lettering style (such as script) on a sketch of a golf shirt.

Can anyone point me to a resource for this? Thanks!

[a1call]

Hi,
This might be an overkill and expensive for your purpose, but one software that can do this is WireFusion. The path of least resistance is probably doing it using flash or DHTML.

[jsinger]

Rawlings, the sporting goods company, offers personalized baseball gloves on their site.

Customer types in his name, chooses the font style and color and hits enter. Results are shown very convincingly as an actual personalized glove. Bet it's a very powerful tool in selling those top-of-the-line gloves.

I'll take a look at what you suggested.

[a1call]

Hi jsinger,
I couldn't find the customization you were referring to. Please sticky me an example if you get the chance.
I stickied a WF example that I was thinking of.

[whoisgregg]

You won't find a script available to do what you are trying to do. What you write, or pay someone to write for you however, will surely use GD [boutell.com] or ImageMagick [imagemagick.org].

[a1call]

Hi jsinger,
Rather than fill up your inbox. I will post here. I was wrong it is not Flash the image is a bitmap and I do not know how it is made perhaps using one of the methods mentioned by whoisgregg.

[jsinger]

Still can't find anything to explain the technology Rawlings used to show embroidery on that baseball glove.

[whoisgregg]

Did you follow either of the links I included in message #5?

Added: Rawlings particular application is the simplest `production` image creation script I've seen. There's nothing there that GD or Imagemagick would have any trouble doing.

[jsinger]

Oh, yes, I studied both pages. Didn't see how anything on either site applied to allowing a site visitor to add text over a graphic (in Rawlings case, a baseball glove).

[whoisgregg]

This isn't a javascript thing... But to address your needs, a good intro to using GD with PHP is the Introduction to PHP Image Functions [nyphp.org] presentation from Jeff Knight of New York PHP. It's 30 pages long, but it's an easy read.

As I've said before, there just aren't "copy and paste" scripts out there to do what you want. You will have to write it or contract it out. My first GD/PHP project probably took 500+ hours to code, but I was trying to do a lot more than you want to do.

[jsinger]

I'll read that. I was mostly curious how Rawlings handled the glove customization. Thought that I might attempt something similar for my site if I could find a simple script. Many thanks for the help.