Displaying a printable color square

NoBullMan

I have a form that allows the user to configure some properties of an item. One
of the properties is the color scheme. So, if they selected green and red (they have a choice of 64 colors), at the end I wanted to present them with a summary of their configuration and wanted to show their selected colors as small colored squares. I am using php to create the resulting summary page.
The problem is if I use tables or CSS to create this square, by defualt, it is not printable since it is taken as a background color.
I heard that I can create an image on the fly and color it using ImageMagick or GD
libraries. Can you please tell me how to go about this? I sthere any PHP library my ISP needs to install or can I just call some already-there functions to do this?

TIA.

dotnotwhat

If your PHP installation has GD support included then you have all you need to do this.

Make a test script that calls phpinfo() function and look at the output. Should hopefully have a section about GD. If not, talk to your host and tell them you need GD.

Presuming you have GD, read up on image functions in the PHP Manual. Specifically you'll need to use imagecreate() to create an image resource and imagecolorallocate() to set a colour to use for the image.

imagecolorallocate() uses RGB values to define a colour.

jmrouleau

Correct me if I am wrong but I think if you make a seperate style sheet and link it like above it will allow for printing of background colors

dotnotwhat

I havn't tested this (so if anyone does, please post some feedback!) but I'm pretty sure no CSS will override most browser's default settings of not printing background colours and in some cases, borders. If this is truly the case, foreground images seem to be your answer.