Screen Ruler
Courtesy of VirtualPROMOTE
Gazette - Issue #41 - February 13, 1998
Review by Hayden Mitchell of Webthemes
Jim sent me a
interesting little program to test out this last
week.
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Screen Ruler
Courtesy of VirtualPROMOTE Gazette - Issue #41 - February 13, 1998
Review by Hayden Mitchell of Webthemes
Jim sent me a interesting little program to test out this last week.
I am always a little skeptical about another shareware program, I
have learned the hard way that loading up your system with every
program that sounds cool results in a cluttered hard drive and sooner or latter no room on the drive or system slowdown. I had to add a second drive a few months back. But Jim said this was a cool little item so I gave it a try.
The program is Screen Ruler. What it does is put a ruler on the
screen? Big deal you say. What do I need a ruler for? Well if you are like a good many of us out there on the Internet, you do your own pages. I have spent a lot of hours behind a drafting table in the past, and one of the things I have found very frustrating while doing page layouts and images is trying to decide how big something should be to "fit" on the screen and look "just so", you know, you would like that page logo to go from just about where the back button is to an inch past the stop button, but how big is that really? I have gone so far as to hold a ruler to the screen! Well no more!
Screen Ruler to the rescue. When activated, Screen Ruler appears on the screen in either the horizontal direction, or in the vertical. And, since the we deal in pixels in both image and HTML code, the default scale is in pixels (you could also use inches, centimeters, picas or define a custom scale) So if I wanted to know how far it is from the back button to about an inch past the stop, I put the ruler on the screen, drag it over so the zero is at the stop and now I know it is 500 pixels.
This is only the beginning of what the ruler does, it has many nifty
little features you do not notice at first. For instance, if it is
sitting at the top of the screen and set to the width of the screen
(you can drag the ruler ends to change the length) as I move the
mouse cursor, there is a little read out on the ruler that tells me
how far the cursor is left or right of where the zero end of the
ruler is on the screen. If you want to measure up and down, you click on a icon button on the ruler and it flips from horizontal to
vertical ruler. Click on the right mouse button, and you get the menu of options including the scale, flip, slide to zero (puts zero at edge of screen) the help files and more! It evens measures a diagonal distance from the zero to the cursor point when you push F7.
So now when you are trying to get your page to look as cool as
VirtualPROMOTE and need to know how many pixels wide your table should be, pop up the ruler on the screen and measure. If you ever wondered how Jim gets his pages to stay so orderly with everything in it's place, he does it using tables with the widths specified in pixels. Using height and width designations on all images, and on tables speeds up page loading, and controls the way the page will look on any screen and at any resolution. If you want to maintain control by percentage of screen width, guess what? Yes, the ruler has a scale for percentage of width also!
So, after playing with the Screen Ruler for a few days, I give it two thumbs up, even if this causes some difficulty using the space bar!
Screen Ruler is from Micro Fox Software
<http://www.infinet.com/~microfox/>, author Jesse Carneiro version
2.1 for Win95/NT ($15US) and version 3.1 MAC ($10US)
