Introduction
The -thumbsheet hint is part of SiteGrinder Pro's powerful automatic image gallery creation system.
Click here for a complete overview of galleries and their many options.
The -thumbsheet hint is used in combination with the -thumb hint to rapidly create one or more pages of thumbnails displayed in a straight line or a grid. Like thumbnails, -thumbsheets can optionally appear on the same page as their associated -picturebox.
Thumbsheets are the quickest and easiest way to generate thumbnails.
SiteGrinder needs to know three things to automatically distribute thumbnails in a grid:
- The size each thumbnail should be
- The size of the area in which they should be displayed
- How much space to put between each thumbnail
SiteGrinder gets the individual thumbnail size from a single rectangular image layer employing the -thumb hint.
SiteGrinder bases the size of the area in which to display the thumbnails from a rectangular image layer with the -thumbsheet hint.
A -thumbsheet and -thumb set up in SiteGrinder:
In the image at left you can see that there will be room for 2 or 3 -thumbs across and 2 or 3 down, depending on space between
Neither the solid gray rectangle in the thumb layer or the large gray outline will appear on the page created by SiteGrinder, they are guides only.
Thumbsheets can grow, scroll, or produce additional pages when there is a need for more thumbnails than can fit in the area designated by the -thumbsheet. (see below)
In the "Galleries" pane of the SiteGrinder window you can determine the spacing between the thumbnails in pixels.
When not to use thumbsheets
- Thumbsheets do not support metadata in layer set/group thumbnails.
- Thumbsheets only lay out the thumbnails in an even line or grid based on the size of the thumbs and the size of the thumbsheet. If you desire a less linear or rectangular layout you can manually duplicate and arrange multiple -thumb layers
Only one thumbsheet can be used per page.
Making Thumbs Appear in a Line
SiteGrinder will never place more thumbs than can fit in the -thumbsheet area.
You can use this fact to make a vertical or horizontal line of thumbs. This can be especially useful for pages that contain both thumbs and full sized images.
A vertical line of -thumbs can be created by making the -thumbsheet just wider than the thumbnail you create, and as tall as you prefer, for example.
Keep in mind that SiteGrinder 2 Pro at release does not support horizontal scrolling of -thumbsheets using the -scroll hint.
Thumbsheet Backgrounds
Remember, -thumb and -thumbsheet layers are just placeholders to indicate size and position. They don't appear on the built web pages.
If you want to create a visible background behind your -thumbs, use one or more separate layers behind the -thumbsheet layer.
When there are too many thumbs to fit in one thumbsheet
Many galleries will contain more images than can fit on a single page of thumbnails. SiteGrinder has three ways to address this:
Scroll
The -scroll hint allows a -thumbsheet to have a vertical scroll bar. Thus a an image layer named mythumbs-thumbsheet-scroll will allow the viewer of the page to scroll to any thumbs not initially visible in the thumbsheet.
If you plan to use the -scroll hint with your -thumbsheet you will need to take the width of the scrollbar into account.
Grow
The -grow hint allows a -thumbsheet to expand downward until it is large enough to display all of the -thumbs on a single page.
If you wish to have a repeating background tile behind a growing -thumbsheet you can use an interiorgrow-tile.
Additional Pages
If neither -grow nor -scroll are used then SiteGrinder will place as many thumbs as can fit on a page and then generate as many additional pages as is necessary to display every -thumb. As with -picturebox pages, automatic navigation between multiple thumbnail pages can be be created by adding next-button and prev-button layers.
Learn More
Choose from the below options for more information on -thumbsheets:
