I rely on ImageCR3 for a number of my sites. However, I've come up against a variety of limitations with it over the past couple years (single-threaded, no crop anchor, etc) and all of my emails to the support addresses have been ignored. So I'm looking for an alternative.
My first thought was CFImage, but it seems to produce far too low of quality for the same image size, and seems excessively slow. Is there any other tool out there that can do what ImageCR does, as efficiently as ImageCR does it, that I could use instead? Or am I best off loading the jpg in CFImage, cropping and saving as PNG, then loading the PNG in ImageCR for the remainder of editing?
I'm using ColdFusion MX 7 and ColdFusion MX 9 (soon all to be migrated to the latter).
ImageMagick? Seems to work like a charm.
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So I have a programming project that I have to do for my school. What I have to do is setup a 2 player dice game. I could have gone the easy way and just display the number of the 2 die, but I was thinking of using images that I made in photoshop instead. However, the problem is that I do not know how to change images in an efficient way.
My first option is using the visibility tag on several images laid on top of eachother and change it accordingly as such
image1.visible = false
image2.visible = true
However, I do not think that is very efficient. Images also do not support changing the image with code from my research.
Secondly, I could use a PictureBox instead, which do support changing the image as the program is running. However, it does not support transparency, and the die images are transparent. Plus it gives me the invalid image file error, I guess due to the transparency in the gif files.
There is also the cheap workaround of me making the background of the images the same as the form background.
So is there a more efficient way I am missing out? I know that the cheap workaround would be the best option for this case, but I would like to have this knowledge for future use like semi-transparent pixels that blend in and such.
And before you ask, no, I cannot use another programming language as visual basic 6 is what my school teaches. Thankfully they are changing it soon, but I am stuck with this for now.
Turns out you CAN change the pictures of Images, while keeping transparency and stretch. I am going to properly show it:
Image1.Picture = LoadPicture("YOURPATHHERE.gif")
This is what I get for believing what I've seen on some forum.
Also, the error of invalid image file was due to the images being corrupted for some reason.
What language or technology would I need to be able to create documents online? I want to be able to add text and images and move them into position, resize etc, similar to this.
And then when complete, create a PDF from them.
Sorry if this is a bit vague, I just need to know where to start researching.
You need to decide on your basic technology: Flash, Silverlight, Canvas, client-side SVG, server-side SVG or server-side bitmap. There are also commercial solutions that work with Adobe InDesign documents (and probably a host of other proprietary formats) but I'd expect those not to be cheap.
Flash/Silverlight require plugins, and are considered by some to be a dying technology - though I am sure that is disputed. Canvas is 'very HTML5' and is essentially a bitmap built/rendered on the client, but if you are ultimated rendering to PDF it may not provide the resolution you need. The same limitation affects building an image server-side too - you should probably be dealing with vector elements plus bitmaps, rather than rendering everything to pixels as you go.
That leaves SVG in my list, either on the client (see RaphaelJS) or on the server (see Inkscape). I'm doing some work with server-side SVG rendering at the moment, and it is promising; although subject to more scalability issues than client-side, it doesn't suffer from browser-compatibility issues or the limitations of browser rendering.
The biggest issue in browser SVG rendering is flowed paragraph text and text in/on a path - I am not sure how well these are implemented in modern browsers, or how much agreement there is between them. This is especially the case given that some of these require SVG1.2, and browsers (afaik) are only just settling on SVG1.1, after many years. But, if you just want to do standard blocks of text, bitmaps and vector elements, browser-based SVG should suit you fine.
The example you've given uses a server-side technology (SVG, or perhaps a commercial format) and renders to low-res PNG on the client.
In your case, once you've considered how to 'do the editing', you'll need to consider how to render to PDF, which will be done on the server. You could go low-level and use something like FPDF, use a report renderer like Jasper, or use a graphics system like GhostScript, Inkscape, Scribus, ps2pdf, svg2pdf etc.
Aside: I normally don't answer questions without obvious prior research. But, since you've indicated that you will indeed undertake this, I'm happy to help get you started.
I am trying to optimize my site to accomplish at least 90 on YSlow and PageSpeed.
I am doing pretty well. But in the following result, there are 4 images that show that take 9-10 seconds to load. If you see the detail, it actually shows that of those 10 seconds, mostluy 99% is while connecting only.
This is a magento store, and I am not sure what I should do to fix this problem because the images are not really big.
http://gtmetrix.com/reports/www.theprinterdepo.com/FyZjLbUX
Thank you
Interesting, even WebPageTest.org shows the same issues, but there's nothing obvious as to why this occuring (at least to me), but I can make some guesses:
you're calling an image from within the .css file on www.printerdepot.net to an image on www.printerdepot.com? (additional DNS lookup)? Sharding issue?
but then why does it only affect some images?
a bunch of other possibly related issues that are cascading through?
I'd suggest trialling converting them to Base64 Data URIs and updating the CSS to see if that improves the performance. See this article for more.
instead of having small images why don't you have only one image sprite? It will be much faster (http://www.w3schools.com/css/css_image_sprites.asp) and you will only need to send to the client one image
This may well be a little of an open-ended question
The site I am working on requires to be optimised for performance. One of the key areas is to optimise the file sizes of the images used upon the site.
Unfortunatley these images are being created by employees who do not have the required knowledge for creating images for the web, and it is my job to produce a set of guidelines for them to use.
I was wondering whether there was any resource/guidlines/literature regarding typical images file sizes for images of different dimensions - as I would like to include something like this to aid them to ensure their images are being created properly.
Any info would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks in advance
I can't answer the opinion question, but I can suggest some guidelines that will keep your images smaller.
First off, if they're using Photoshop to edit their images, it's likely they're storing a whole bunch of crap in the headers (digital papertrail, EXIF data, and such). Also, folks will frequently save in too high a bit depth.
For novice users, trying to explain why they need to use "save for web" is more likely to confuse them. Instead, just point them at:
http://www.smushit.com/ysmush.it/
This site is rather handy - it will compress all the images on a page you specify, or you can upload the images.
You should strongly consider writing some guidelines about where images are stored as well. It's frequently very beneficial to have your static image content stored on several servers, apart from your dynamic content. Most browsers will only download a limited # of files at a time from any given website (usually it's 2).
Unless there's a good reason, all your images should be cached using one of the HTTP cache techniques (expires, etags, etc).
Good luck.
72 dpi as a resolution and either jpeg or png formats work best.
Try to use images at the exact pixel area size they will end up being displayed as. This is specified by the images height and width attributes.
You can set the output quality of a jpeg image which will also save file size although there is a trade off against image quality.
I hope this is of use.
See here: http://code.google.com/p/ie7-js/
Does anyone have any experience or remarks about this javascript? Is it worth including? Do you recommend it?
I know many people, myself included that are using various IE hacks to get transparent PNG support. THis looks like a little bit more help, and as long as it works, and the size is fairly small, I wouldn't see much against using it.
I've used it before, and my results are mixed. Those scripts cause IE to churn for a bit on page load. Basically, you have to think of it as iterating through Elements and stylesheet rules to apply "fixes" for areas that are deficient in that particular rendering engine. In some cases, depending on how complicated your markup or stylesheets are, that can take a bit of time and you will see the browser hang.
That said, if you can trade off that performance cost, you will save development time as you'll spend less time hacking around IE6 quirks; IE7/IE8 will provide enough missing functionality that you can avoid certain edge cases, can develop using standards better (min-width/min-height, multiple className selectors, etc.), and certain rendering issues will disappear.
However, if you just need 24-bit transparent PNG support, use a tool built for that. Including IE7/IE8.js for PNG support alone is like pounding in a nail with a tank. Use DD_belatedPNG for that.
It works, but its worth keeping in mind that ie7.js and ie8.js do much more than provide transparent PNG support. Even with the transparent PNG support, its worth keeping in mind that transparent background images cannot be tiled (repeated) using background-repeat or positioned using background-position. This hinders any ability to use CSS rollovers using background-position. I've only used it on one site I've done, and now that I'm updating the site I can't remove the ie8.js because if I do the entire website breaks layout in IE. I don't believe I'll be using it in the future, and instead rely on simple CSS hacks or simply allow my sites to "degrade gracefully" in IE6.
I know that there are some tools for fixing the transparent PNG problem which are more flexible than this. For instance, the jQuery plugin ifixpng2 will support background position, which ie7-js doesn't do.
As long as you are aware of exactly what it fixes, I would say go for it. I'm not sure about this lib exactly, but some libs get very expensive if you have a large DOM, as they tend to hook in HTC file base behaviors on EVERY DOM Element. This causes the dreaded "Loading x of y" status bar message to flash constantly on the initial load, and any newly generated DOM content.
well its beautiful and works grate way u can use cs3 features like li:hover. we did lost of project last time using ie8.js and it works great way.