Programming Web Graphics with Perl and GNU Softwar

Image Map Tools

There are basically two ways of specifying the coordinates of the regions within an image map. The first is the “brute force” or “map hacker” method of using an image display program such as xv, Paint Shop Pro, or display to bring up the image in a window and manually picking out the points that define the shapes. The second method is with a WYSIWYG image map editor.

Most of the commercial image editing packages aimed at web developers (such as Adobe ImageReady and Macromedia Fireworks) offer built-in tools for making image map regions fairly painless. Some web server packages also come with image map tools. The following is a collection of tools that are either freeware or shareware; ftp addresses are provided when available.

Map Hacker Tools for Generating Coordinates

These tools offer the ability to manually pick out coordinates for use in image maps:

xv

xv is a useful all-purpose interactive image manipulation program written by John Bradley for the X Window System. It offers the ability to quickly manipulate many image file formats, and provides a nice interface for common tasks such as cropping, sizing, and manipulating the color tables of images. It can be used to find coordinates for defining image map regions by clicking the mouse inside the image window and drawing a selection rectangle, which can be fine-tuned with handles. The info window will display the size and position of the rectangular region. Individual points of a polygon or a circle must be picked ...