How to modify a .png image with VBScript - image

I have a need to select a portion of a .png file, with specific cordinators, and delete this area then save the file back with the same name.
I would appreciate if you can help to come up with a VBScript script that can accomplish this task.
It would be great if all proesses happen in the background, but it would be ok too if the image file has to be open and visible. Thanks a bunch!!!

A PNG file, like any other binary file can be edited with CMD or VBS.
A PNG file layout is as follows:
File header
"Chunks" within the file
Pixel format
Transparency of image
Compression
Interlacing
Animation
Read the PNG format in RFC 2083 to know how to edit/create a PNG file at binary/bit level.
To speed up the editing process, libraries are available for application level editing.
Here are some VBA codes for image manipulation.
ImageMagick also provides libraries that can be accessed via VBS for image editing.
Here's a VBScript Image Class for bmp and pcx files (which PNG can be converted to before editing via WIA).
Loadpicture function described here doesn't seem to support PNG, but this discussion might solve it.
The Windows Image Acquisition Library v2.0 supports PNG, BMP, JPG, GIF and TIFF image formats, and comes with Windows Vista and later versions. Sample scripts are available to demonstrate "image manipulation using the ImageFile object". The Vector.ImageFile property also "creates an ImageFile object from raw ARGB data".
More sample codes here & here show how to rotate, flip, scale, crop, etc with WIA Image constants in vbs. To remove unwanted areas of image (with given coordinates), use the crop function.
Here's a discussion of WIA 2.0 image editing on stackoverflow.

VBScript doesn't have any image editing functions, so you need an external tool for that. For example, GIMP can do image processing from the command line (see here). ImageMagick provides a scriptable component in addition to the command-line interface (details here).
To run a command line from a VBScript script, you can use the WShShell.Run method. To create an instance of a COM scriptable component, use the CreateObject function.

Related

Converting TIFF to PDF with GraphicsMagick MediaBox / CropBox resolution

We are currently converting TIFF files to PDF using GraphicsMagick. The TIFF is coming from an eFAX and has a (pixel) resolution of 1728x2200.
If you do the conversion with tiff2pdf or just open it on Preview and convert export it to PDF, it is generated with a MediaBox value of 612x792 point, which is what is expected.
However graphics magick generates a MediaBox of 1728x4400 and a CropBox of 610x792. It all looks good if you open it on a PDF viewer because it's using the CropBox but if you're feeding it to GhostScript after, you don't get the Image on the full page but as a small square inside the document.
The lazy solutions would be to change for Tiff2PDF or add -dUseCropBox to our GhostScript command but I'd like to know what GraphicsMagick option should be used to have the PDF with the good MediaBox. It's like it doesn't understand that the resolution is in Pixels and not in Point. Hope somebody has insights

Create small high quality PDF embedding optimized PNG?

I'm trying to create a small PDF file, embedding one optimized PNG image displayed as a header and footer on a 3 page PDF (same image must appear 6x in the PDF)
My optimized PNG image is only 2.3KB. It looks very sharp.
Failed with libreoffice
When I insert just one instance of the 2.3KB PNG image into a Libreoffice Writer doc containing only text, then export as PDF I can see that the image gets re-compressed to JPG and the resulting PDF file grows by about 40KB after adding the image. It also loses quality, the PNG also gets JPG fuzzy edges.
If I right click the image and select compression, there is no way to disable recompressing the image (it's already optimized better than libreoffice could do it) I've tried setting a compression level of 0,1,9 etc. Choosing JPG, no resize, lossless, etc but there was no improvement.
Failed with wkhtmltopdf
I also tried making a test page and used wkhtml2pdf but it did the same thing. Adding the low quality flag made no difference.
PDF Spec suggests PNG is supported?
From skimming the PDF spec, it looks like PNG images are supported.
Even plain text PDF files are surprisingly large
The disappointing thing is also when I take a 7KB HTML file which is basically just <html><body><p>foo...</p><p>bar...</p> (only about 15 paragraphs) with no CSS. The resulting 2 page PDF file is 30KB. Why should a 7kb (almost plain text) file become 30kb as a PDF?
Suggestions?
Can someone please suggest how to make a small PDF file in Linux?
I need to include 7KB of text and repeat one PNG image 6 times.
Manually or programatically. I'll take whatever I can get at this point.
PDF Spec suggests PNG is supported?
PNG isn't supported per se; PDF allows embedding JPEG images as-is, but not PNG images. PDF does borrow a set of features of the PNG format, however.
rinohtype (full disclosure: I'm the author) tries to embed as much as possible from PNG images as-is into the PDF. This does involve some bit-juggling to separate the alpha channel from the color data for example, but no reencoding of the image is performed. It does not (yet) support interlaced PNGs.
rinohtype should be able to do what you want to achieve. But please note that it currently is in a beta stage, so you might encounter some bugs.
Even plain text PDF files are surprisingly large
To keep the PDF size as small as possible, make sure not to embed/subset any of the fonts. Use only the fonts from the base 14 PDF fonts which are provided by PDF readers.
What you want is certainly achievable. Regarding the image quality, I would recommend making your image twice the size that you want it to actually display at in the PDF to keep it looking sharp.
As to the size, I've just modified a test in my PDF writer module (WIP..) to include a 7.2K png, 200px x 70px, in a PDF twice and the PDF came out at 6.8K 8). There's not much text included, but more text will only add what it's worth + a small percentage.
You can see the module and original test here.. https://github.com/DoccaPDF/docca-pdf-writer/blob/master/src/tests/writer.js#L40
That test adds ~112K of images to the PDF and results in a 103K PDF.
Of course not all images are created equal so you milage may vary..
*the images are only actually added to the PDF once, but are displayed multiple time.

Inkscape - Not fully converting png into svg

I opened one PNG file in Inkscape and exported it as SVG. When I opened that file with notepad I came to know that the PNG file is embedded within it. If the conversion happened then the resulting file should have only SVG related tags. It shouldn't embed the image within it. Or Am I doing anything wrong.
Note: Save as option also producing the same kind of file. I am using Inkscape version 0.48 in Windows 7 - 64 bit.
This is a bit of an old thread, but it comes up early in Google so I thought I'd contribute something.
In Inkscape, you must do a trace to change the image into SVG. Look at the Path | Trace bitmap menu item and play with the options on that screen.
After creating the trace, you can remove your source image and have a pure svg in your saved file.
I've found it helpful to create layers in Inkscape and move the source image to one layer and put the trace on another layer to let me make quick comparisons using the 'hide layer' buttons.
BTW, your source image can be anything - bmp, jpg, png, etc.
A .png file is a raster image file. In order to convert it to a vector graphic based format like .svg and have it be "native" svg rather than an included image you are going to either have to use a program that can rasterize it or in Inkscape trace the bitmap and turn it into paths. Inkscape provides information on tracing: http://inkscape.org/doc/tracing/tutorial-tracing.html

Ghostscript Stamp Image on PDF

Is there any way to stamp or overlap a tiff image on a existing PDF file and output the result using Ghostscript?
I have two PDF which i want to merge in a result PDF with one over the other using ghostscript. I want to know if this can be done and how, or if it may work with one PDF as tiff image on top of the base PDF.
Can ghostscript make this stamp using layers in the PDF?
Thank you for your answers
The pdfwrite device in Ghostscript doesn't really support layers, so you can't use that. Also its unclear why you think layers would help.
TIFF isn't part of PostScript (or PDF), so you can't directly read a TIFF file into GS. I have elsewhere posted a PostScript program which reads TIFF files and renders them for output. You could use that to read a TIFF file.
However, you would have to mess about with either the PDF interpreter or a custom EndPage procedure in order to read and render the TIFF file. And unless you take specific kinds of action, it will be opaque, which may well not be what you want.
The Ghostscript PDF interpreter doesn't really lend itself to this kind of manipulation, have you considered using pdftk instead ?

What image format is fastest for BlackBerry?

I'm trying to load some images using Bitmap.getBitmapResource(), but it takes about 2 or 3 seconds per image to load. I'm testing on the Storm, specifically. The odd thing is, when I install OS 5.0, the loading goes in a snap, no delay at all.
Should I be looking at the format used? Or where the files are stored? I've tried both 24- and 8-bit PNGs, with transparency. The files are stored in a subdirectory in the COD, so getBitmapResource is passed a path, like "images/img1.png" instead of just "img1.png".
Is any of this making things slower?
If you're looking for the most efficient format for storing image data within your application binary, the recommendation is PNG with the 565 colorspace. The BlackBerry Theme Studio toolkit has the ability to load any PNG and export it in this format. Its the best one because its what the BlackBerry uses internally.
Try to use EncodedImage, see Is it better to use Bitmap or EncodedImage in BlackBerry?
In case you need Bitmap class, try also bmp (don't forget to turn off "convert image files to .png" option in BB project settings)

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