Develop Reference

Is text rendering possible onto 2D images with Javascript/PHP?

I own a sports apparel company and I'm looking to have an applet built that will allow customers to see how their team names will look in certain colors on jerseys. Below you can see the final result of a competitor site's Flash applet where text is rendered on 2D surfaces/images.
My requirements: I need users to be able to set the font, primary text color, outline text color, and text style (arched or straight).
So my question-- Is this sort of text rendering possible with only Javascript/PHP?
If so, what limitations do you for see? I've been told the arching and outline text color may be issues. I've also been told that I may have to upload library files to a server where the actual rendering may take place.
If not, what scripting would you guys recommend? I'm trying to stay away from Flash because it's slow and costly.
I'll be passing this onto our developers so please feel free to be as detailed as possible. I figure'd I'd save them some leg work!
Thank you!

Depending on how complex you want your graphics to be, html5 drawing abilities could be used. Check Raphaël library, for instance, webGL/canvas renderers already have a lot of features in modern browsers.
As of the solution with server rendering, it's also possible with gd2(php), but imho that would be less convenient, at least try something different from php (btw, what's your backend running on?)
Your competitor's solution with java applet honestly seems the easiest, except that it requires jre, which few people are eager to install =)

That's kind-of a high level question, but yes you can definitely use javascript for it.
If there's a problem with getting characters to look right, you can always save each letter as a separate image and have javascript place them next to each other in preview. I'd try to see how close you could get with the existing fonts first.
Layering the text: one color large font, then a different color smaller font will give you the outline effect your looking for.

implementing the CTRL-F (find) functionality in swing

I am creating an open source document editor in Java Swing and I want to implement the CTRL-F (find) functionality in swing. Without starting from the ground up is there any open source Java code available which I can borrow where this functionality is already implemented?

Key Bindings is what you are looking for. Here is the tutorial: http://docs.oracle.com/javase/tutorial/uiswing/misc/keybinding.html
JDialog (or frame.showInputDialog) is what you should use after the ctrl+F action is fired. Enter the search string here and search the document from the returned string. Again the tutorial is in the java docs.
Highlighting is quite complicated and depends on what code you have written. You will have to use the repaint method on some selected text after using the seBackgroundColor(Color color)
You haven't placed any code so I can't answer with any code. But its a much better idea to see the tutorial and understand it yourself rather than copy-pasting code.

Printing data to a pre printed form/stationery

We have a requirement where we already have pre printed stationery and want user to put data in a HTML form and be able to print data on that form. Alignment/text size etc are very important since the pre-printed stationery already has boxes for each character. What could be a good way to achieve this in java? I have thinking of using jasper reports. Any other options? May be overlay image with text or something?
Also we might need to capability to print on plain paper in which case the boxes needs to be printed by our application and the form should match after the printed with the already printed blank stationery containing data.
Do we have some open source framework to do such stuff?

Jaspersoft reports -- http://sourceforge.net/projects/jasperreports/
You will then create XML templates, then you will be able to produce a report in PDF, HTML, CSV, XLS, TXT, RTF, and more. It has all the necessary options to customize the report. Used it before and recommend it.
You will create the templates with iReport then write the code for the engine to pass the data in different possible ways.
check http://www.jaspersoft.com/jasperreports
Edit:
You can have background images and overlay the boxes over it and set a limit on the max character size ... and many more
It is very powerful and gives you plenty of options
Here is one of iReport's tutorial for a background image http://ireport-tutorial.blogspot.com/2008/12/background-image-in-ireport.html

The big problem when printing form content that has been filled in electronically, is aligning it correctly on the pre-printed form. You may get content to align for one printer, but when you use another it is completely misaligned.
Fly Software have a form design product called InForm Designer that gets around the problem nicely by allowing users to specify and save vertical and horizontal offsets for printers. This ensures filled in form content is always aligned. I've tried it and it works perfectly. Take a look for yourself here...
http://www.flysoftware.com/products/inform_designer/overview.asp
It might be worth implementing a printer offset similar to InForm's in your own application (if possible).

Some things to think about.
First in terms of the web page, do you want use the stationery as the form layout?
Does it have to be exact?
Combed boxes (one for each character)
Do you want to show it like that on the web page, or deal with the combing later.
How are you going to deal with say a combed 6 digit number. Is this right aligned. What if they enter 7 digits. Same for text. what if it won't fit.
Font choices, we had a lot of fun with W...
How aligned do you want the character within the box, what font limitations does that imply, some of the auto magic software we looked at did crap like change the size of each character.
Combed editing is a nightmare, we display combed, but raise an edit surface the size of the full box on selection.
Another thing that might drive you barking mad, you find find small differences in the size and layout of the boxes, so they look okay from a distance but a column of boxes sort of shifts about by a pixel. Some of testing guys had to lend us their electron microscopes, so we could see how many ink molecules we were out by. :(
Expect to spend a lot of time in the UI side of things, and remember printed stationery changes, so giving yourself some sort of meta description of the form to start with will save you loads of trouble later on.

Code/text folding in SWING

I'm looking for a way to provide 'text folding' capabilities to a swing JTextArea or JTextPane
More specifically, I want to add a block of data in a text component and I want the component to display only some header line. Then the user can unfold the block by clicking some icon. This is just like the code folding feature in most IDE.
I've found ->some sample code<- after some thorough search, but the mechanisms used here are quite obscure to me and it stops working when I try to remove text from the document.
Maybe using XML as input could be a lead ?

This one how to add collapsible area
http://java-sl.com/collapse_area.html
This one how to represent XML
http://java-sl.com/xml_editor_kit.html

I would start by looking at the NetBeans API: http://bits.netbeans.org/dev/javadoc/org-netbeans-modules-editor-fold/overview-summary.html
If you were to do it yourself, you'd need to provide a Document implementation that makes the JTextComponent think that pieces are being added or removed, then attach click events that tell the document to update itself. A lot of work.
Visually, it may also be better to use JEditorPane, but that's probably more work.

Looking for an efficient Java Swing based console

I'm looking for a highly efficient Swing Java component which I can just plug into my application UI. I already tried using the classes within Swing such as JTextArea with no avail; they simply aren't high-performance enough and have any crippling drawbacks. Additionally, it'd be nice if it had standard console features such as scroll-lock, clear console, colours, and so on.
Edit: Forgot to say, this console will have a lot of debug information streaming into it, and it needs to be fully scrollable.
Cheers,
Chris

I fail to see what is wrong with using a JTextPane. It supports attributes which you can specify as each piece of text is added to the console. Clearing it is also obviously a no brainer. When added to a scroll pane it also supports scrolling.
You can add scroll locking by using Smart Scrolling.
Plus, it removes text too early and
No idea what that means as text is never removed unless you specifically remove it from the document.
doesn't allow the user to scroll while
input is being entered (afaik). The
effect is that you just see text
flashing while the number of rows
remains the same.
By default the text scrolls automatically as text is append to the document assuming the code is executed on the EDT. This scrolling can be controlled the the example provided in the link above.
Edit:
but I'd still like a library solution
I don't know of any
auto-colourise text coming from
different streams
The Message Console might give you some ideas.
(i.e., detect [error] prefix on a
line) and colourise lines based on
this)
This is easily done by adding a DocumentFilter to the Document of the text pane. You can add attributes as text is inserted into the Document.

Be sure that you read about the Event Dispatching Thread (EDT) in swing!
BTW: a simple search 'java swing console' will give you a lots of hints OR you could use/adapt the beanshell textfield which is a jtextfield too ...