AN ASS having heard some Grasshoppers chirping, was highly enchanted; and, desiring to possess the same charms of melody, demanded what sort of food they lived on to give them such beautiful voices. They replied, "The dew."
The Ass resolved that he would live only upon dew, and in a short time died of hunger. Even a fool is wise-when it is too late!
aesop

below the image viewer and text input boxes, there are section links to take you quickly to the smileygenerator element you want. On each side of the smileygenerator elements sections, you'll see a border of smileys with their arms outstretched. Click on those after you've selected a smileygenerator element and you'll be taken back to the top of the page where you can submit the form to generate your smiley. Using a gradient background in your image will kill all transparency in the generated image so only use it if that is the desired effect. text works best at size "7" and above. You can center the text by adjusting the values in the text area controls. "0" is the absolute starting point and "100" is the absolute endpoint of the smilygenerator's images. 100 will start your text off the image though so stick to a max of 95 or less. Colors for the smileygenerator text messages can be adjusted by changing the 6 digit hex value. "000000" generates black text, "FF0000" generates red text, "00FF00" generates green text, and "0000FF" generates blue text. There are many variations in between and many tutorials and guides on google t help you with hex color values. While this smileygenerator is a lot more complex in the menus and display, the script is a lot simpler and will allow for more regular additions and updates. Everything is modular, even the smileygenerator script itself, so things can be rearranged and repaired easily. There is still some minor debugging left to do, text colors change with certain leg combinations, reason unknown. Some images need to be added before others to get the best result. Small things that'll all work out with time.

A German webmaster, having seen the smiley generator, was highly enchanted; and, desiring to possess the same charms of "site", demanded that balamm share his script and in return, they would all have such beautiful images. Balamm replied, "I have a newer and much better script I will share with you."
The Ass (the german webmaster)
resolved that he would live only upon the old script he had seen , and in a short time his site died of hunger.
Even a fool is wise-when it is too late!
balamm

When I first got involved with these invision style emoticons, or smileys, there just wasn't any thing like this generator or even a smiley sign generator. All the smiley signs in the invision style were manually created by individual artists from many different forums. I knew it couldn't be too difficult to do, so I took on the task of learning how to generate and modify images using PHP and the GD library for images. The first attempts were very crude, even laughable now as I look back on them. simple button scripts were converted to place text half hazzardly onto a pre photoshopped image holding a sign. The results were never certain and the bugs or unexpected features were many. I spent the next few months searching for and dissecting every GD script I could get. I read as much of the PHP manuals instructions as I could without speaking "linux" and faked the rest. I still have no idea what some of the garbage they "talk" about means, but I did gain some insight and experience and set to work on the very first smiley generator. Actually even that one wasn't a true smiley generator, just another sign generator hacked from a hack of a hack.... ! So invision now had a real smiley sign maker, not a crappy phpBB smiley sign maker. Next, back to work on a real smiley generator. I discovered a method of coding an array of information that would place a a group of pixels or a single colored pixel anywhere on an existing image. It took hours to code each image and debug the scripts but the results were awesome. When I had enough of them to publish, that became WenPigsFly SmileyGenerator #1.
Now, a few months later and with additional PHP skills, here's my latest attempt! A very simple script with a very complex form system. As good as this one is, I still expect there'll be many more improvements to come.
I've released the first smiley generator, the sign maker, for download. If you'd like a complete working copy with all images, visit our forums and have a look in the wenpigsfly/metalworks software section. Remember, you will need a PHP enabled serer to use any of these scripts.