Myspace Writing Questions

     If you want “big” writing you can try CSS style tags but you’re limited to a few choices: Ariel, Times Roman, etc. For more expressive text, try a bitmap-based font. If you look around, there are websites that give away complete A-Z letter sets to play with. Or you can draw and scan or photograph your own letters. Or you can buy fonts if you want a more professional look. Then find a free graphics program like Gimp and cut-paste the letters you need to make the words you want. This also allows you to change the size in pixels to whatever you want.lunatix.png
     I wouldn’t recommend websites that put the letters together for you with HTML code. They won’t host your writing for free forever–eventually they will change your letters into ads. Once you finish building your words, you should really host the final images yourself if you want them to stay on the web a while. I use Site5.com to host my images.
     If you like a font and use the letters all the time, consider hosting each letter individually: a.png, b.png, c.png, etc. With all your letters uploaded you can build words faster with “img” tags, without loading your graphics editor to cut-paste letters together every time you need new words.
     If you draw and scan (or photograph) your own alphabet using a black pen on paper, you may need to fix it up digitally. Bump up your image contrast until your letters look sharp. Contrast also turns your paper all-the-way white. If it’s still rough, try a “blur�? filter effect, then increase the contrast again. This trick gives you smooth, crisp edges that look nice as long as you don’t over-blur away important details.