MCS has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

I am trying to do a geneology page for my family and the idea is to have books that have the family name on it (Mine would by flynn) either in a bookself fashion or piled up books. Rather than create static images for each family I was thinking of having a few random book images and then superimposing the Family name on them. I am guessing the best way to do this would be with the GD module?

If anyone has any other suggestions of other ways to do something similar I would apreciate it.

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Re: Generating graphics from database
by suaveant (Parson) on Aug 27, 2004 at 15:33 UTC
    GD would work for overlaying, there is also Imlib2, which is more powerful, but poorly documented.

    Of course... if you are creating web pages your best bet would probably be doing it all on the web page with CSS and DHTML, unless you are doing really funky things.

                    - Ant
                    - Some of my best work - (1 2 3)

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Re: Generating graphics from database
by dragonchild (Archbishop) on Aug 27, 2004 at 17:20 UTC
    There are probably some genealogy-related modules on CPAN that will get you 80-90% of the way, probably doing most of the functionality you're looking to add. I'd look at that, first.

    ------
    We are the carpenters and bricklayers of the Information Age.

    Then there are Damian modules.... *sigh* ... that's not about being less-lazy -- that's about being on some really good drugs -- you know, there is no spoon. - flyingmoose

    I shouldn't have to say this, but any code, unless otherwise stated, is untested

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      Thanks for the suggestion. I looked on CPAN but I only really found stuff relating dealing with gedcom files which doesn't really help me because I want to use a database rather than store thing in flat files. (Gedcom files are flatfiles used to import/export/store geneology files)

      Overall I've been pretty unimpressed with the presentation of most geneology sites so I decided to custimize my presentation. The obvious choice for me was perl/cgi/mysql. Most of the stuff is pretty easy but I have some design ideas that would require dynamic images based on information from the database. It's not necessary and it may get axed but I thought it would look cool to have a bookshelf with the family names on the spine of a book. Rather than create one for each family name (which would be easier :-) ) I figured I would see if there was another way to do it.

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