I'm slowly overcoming some of my hurdles with SiteSpinner, but it seems new problems keep popping up :-\

In Photoshop, I created a small, horizontally-rectangular image that I wanted to tile vertically along a section of my site in Sitespinner. So, I imported that image into SiteSpinner. The only way that I found I could tile the image properly this was if I created a new rectangle object, then went to the properties and hit "Tile" after selecting the image I wanted to tile within the blank rectangle object.

That worked out great, because all I had to do was drag the object to whatever dimensions I wanted, and voila - the small image was tiled inside it.

The problem is that - when I publish the site, the tiled image is actually being saved as one large PNG file, as one object. I thought SiteSpinner would only recognize the small image I wanted to tile, and use html to duplicate it within the dimensions I defined with the rectangle tool.

So instead of having the small gif I started with (which was 8 kilobytes), it's saving as a PNG that's over a megabyte in size!

Is there something I'm doing wrong? I also notice that when I create a blank text object (per Brucee's instruction) where I want a square or rectangle of solid color, it's saving that as a PNG too instead of just using html.

I want my site to download fast for people on 56k, so the way it's handling this just isn't going to work out at all.

The usual advice if you want to do something in html (like tile your small image), is to set Anti-Alias and Re-Render off. This instructs SS to not to create an image file.

But I just tried to tile a rectangle with SS V2.50f, and it created an image file -- even set render background off and it still created an image file

So it seems you can't do it (yet!) in SS.

For now, there are a couple of possible workarounds:

Create the tiled rectangle as a "Code Object"; or

Make an i-frame of the size your rectangle, and put a tiled background in that (from the Page Editor)

If you need further help with either of these options, just ask.

Regarding the use of text objects: For rectangles of 5 or more pixels on each side, just use a straight rectangle with Anti-Alias off and Re-Render off. Easy. You should need to get into text/code objects only for rectangles less than 5 pixels in width or height. This current thread points at more info on using text objects for lines and rectangles.

Also make sure you have the latest SiteSpinner, V2.50f. Earlier versions don't render rectangles as html.

The next update (no, I don't know when it will be ready ) will tile the single image in rectangles if re-render and anti-alias is off.

Just a note on code objects as rectangles:

If you do make them less than 5 pixels you may find they appear at slighlty different sizes on different browsers. That is why the rectangle object reverts to images in that case.

Bruceee and Harpo, thanks for the info. I think my only solution right now is to take the large png file, import it into Photoshop, then save it as a large index-colored gif optimized for the web, then reimport it.

I think that'll cut down the file size, but it's still not an ideal solution.