Autofile snapshots

miscdas at boxfrog.com miscdas at boxfrog.com
Mon Mar 24 16:51:01 EST 2003


Ken Norris writes:
[snip]
> What I want to do: 
> 
> I will have a number of different screens available for the same buttons,
> i.e., create a different look and feel for each. The need for doing this has
> to do with varying visual deficits of potential users, and is therefore more
> important than mere "Preference'. 
> 
> I have a background group image which has 'pictures' of buttons in it. The
> actual buttons are exactly aligned (I call it 'registered') to each of the
> appropriate areas of the picture. A bunch of the buttons have different
> functions which mean they must hold icon images separately in these cases,
> so I decided I may as well make separate icons out of _all_ the buttons. 
> 
> The end-use is to eliminate the large background group image it came from,
> and replace it by batch-importing the small mages into a standalone to use
> as icons at runtime, meaning they don't get saved by the standalone, but are
> called up at runtime by the Preferences, which can be changed at any time. 
> 
> All that means making separate images out of each little 'button picture' of
> the large image. There will be about 80 of them. 
> 
> Ken N. 
> 
============
Mr. Norris, 

Just how "large" is the "large background group image"? If it really isn't 
so large, consider leaving it in your stack and generating on-the-fly, via 
import snapshot, from it the images needed for the buttons. 

Whether you generate on-the-fly or do the separate images, the following 
might help you to determine the rectangle to use for generating the image 
with import snapshot. If you originally set up the buttons on the background 
image using a) a regular grid spacing and b) buttons of the same size, then 
after you determine the rectangle of the first button you can easily add the 
appropriate offset to determine the rectangle for all other button images. 
If you must go through them manually, then create a field and put this in 
the stack script of the stack with the background image from which you need 
to import snapshots:
on mouseDown
  put the clickLoc & return after field "ImageRects"
end mouseDown 

Now you can get the rect for each button immage you need by clicking the 
upper left corner of the area on the background image followed by clicking 
the lower right corner. When you do import snapshot using these rect data 
and see your selection is off a few pixels, you have the data to tweak. 

miscdas 




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