Is there any technology available in a browser (client-side) able to convert sRGB colors to CMYK and vice versa using a specified ICC color profile?
I'm currently using a hidden Java applet for the conversions (Java has a built-in class for this), but I'm trying to find an alternative, since java applets are slow and outdated.
SVG would be ideal if browsers supported ICC colors in SVG, but no-one does. Flash or Silverlight would also be good, but I can't find anything relevant.
Am I correct in thinking you want use the ICC profile of the display device?
I am fairly certain there is no facility to determine the display device ICC profile using javascript. At best it may be possible in a third party environment like Flash. The math itself would be no problem.
Of course, this is all really the responsibility of the web browser. Firefox has reasonably good support for colour management. If I'm not mistaken, Microsoft are going to be addressing colour management in IE9.
After reading your question, I can't decide if:
a. you're trying to do a soft-proof operation, or
b. you're building a color picker type of app, and you want to
provide your users with the names of certain colors (from e.g.
pantone or NCS or somesuch) when you display their sRGB-value
approximations, or
c. something else entirely.
What is the CMYK space you are concerned with? If you're doing option (a) -- soft proofing -- you can probably fit curves to the LUTs in the CMYK profile, and use them to figure out a 'shortcut' transform that you can then run in the non-ICC-aware javascript runtime you're working in. Most CMYK profiles do their conversion with LUTs, and many use ICC4 NamedColor2 values (which you may know as the value in 'ncl2' ICC tags).
If this is the case, I can point you to some resources on how to do that -- I am doing it myself using SciPy in the python django color-management image-analysis app platform thing I am working on.
If you're doing option (b), and you need color names, you can extract the names you need from your CMYK profile (most likely NamedColor2 values) and build a lookup table, which you can then serialize it to JSON so you can load it in your app. If your app needs to have some knowledge of the display space, you can probably have the user 'calibrate' your app for their display -- feed them some questions that will allow you to calculate the white-point offset (and possibly the RGB XYZ tristimulii) and then maybe create a quickie transform (which could be as simple as one chromatic adaptation transform I am guessing) which you then apply to color values you want to 'color manage' before you display them.
To do the transforms without a CMS system, Bruce Lindbloom's math is a good place to start:
http://www.brucelindbloom.com/
if it's c) I am very curious as to what it is.
is any of that helpful? I can elaborate and/or provide example code, &c, if you supplement your question (I'm doing work in a similar problem-domain, so we could both win on this).
Related
Im starting a new project. The aim of the project is to create a e-authoring tool for building courses in SCORM Complaint. Im new to this domain and I have little idea on this. I have taken a view on authoring tool in Articulate, which my customer requires to do the same. I understood the content creation, but I am trying to understand How can I export this as SCORM compliant course? In between I learned about xAPI as well And understood it is a kind of enhanced SCORM.
Could any one guide me to understand this,
1) How can create content from my custom authoring tool and export as SCORM complaint
2) Is it better to use xAPI or SCORM.
3) How is the SCORM pacakge communicate with my custom made LMS?
4) Heard about LRS,
My custom authoring tool will be made in React and store would MondDB
Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thankyou!
That is a lot to take on, particularly all at once.
1) The SCORM spec is made up of multiple parts. There is a packaging portion and a runtime portion. The basics are that your package needs to be a zip file, and that zip needs to include specific files that indicate to the LMS what type of standard it is along with other metadata about the package. For SCORM this will be called an imsmanifest.xml file. For xAPI you are most likely going to use a cmi5.xml (see cmi5) or a tincan.xml file (what Articulate Storyline exports when it says "xAPI"). The other parts of the package will depend on what standard and version of that standard (for SCORM 1.2, 2004 2nd, 3rd, or 4th edition) you are targeting, realizing that different LMSs support different standards and different degrees of those standards.
Once you have a package constructed that will import, the content itself (usually an HTML file) will need to locate the JavaScript API provided by the SCORM player (from the LMS) and make specific calls depending on what the content is needing to store or read, this is the runtime portion. The calls will again depend on the standard and version. For xAPI based packages (either tincan.xml packages or cmi5 packages) the content will communicate directly to the LRS based on the information provided on the URL at launch time (there is no built in JavaScript API).
2) This entirely depends on what your customer base looks like and the types of data that you intend to capture. SCORM is a more mature landscape and has wider adoption and is more heavily specified, if the information you need to capture fits into its limited information model then it is still an excellent choice. If you need significant data portability and/or the information you need to capture goes beyond compliance data (pass/fail, complete, and score) and/or interaction data (questions + answers) then you should consider xAPI, specifically via cmi5.
3) The LMS must provide a JavaScript API (specified by the SCORM runtime) which the content will use as its interface. The storage/retrieval of data is implementation specific for the LMS beyond what is included in the specification for the JavaScript API.
4) You didn't really include a question here.
I would suggest familiarizing yourself with the two sets of standards via http://scorm.com and http://xapi.com. And although it is a plug for my company's product, you may want to consider the Rustici Driver as it is a product (library) specifically designed to make it easy for an authoring tool to export content as SCORM 1.2, 2004, AICC, cmi5 or Tin Can (the latter two being xAPI). Once you have your tool up and running with minimal standards support you should consider testing it on Rustici's SCORM Cloud (it is free for this purpose), see http://cloud.scorm.com.
The format is huge, there is no quick reference guides. And different authoring tools have different scorm-support depths. You should probably start with this document
Sounds like you're talking about designing editable content; and the content "framework" itself.
This is a massive effort! This is massive support! That said, people do it.
Having built a CMS system for many supporting subject matters I had to divide and conquer this task.
Few ways I'd think to digest this beast- data, data, data
Requirements on Activities (Interaction types)
Design (static/dynamic) on these interactions
The view/facade displaying can change. Tech moves at the speed of light. Need to come up with a super solid data model.
I'd think about how these can be generic, and how they can be extended to meet the customers goals/needs. All depends how much customization (if any) can happen.
I start mapping all this to SCORM CMI Object level calls. Scoring, Progress, Interactions, Objectives etc...
Get your self a wicked SCORM Content API library or write one yourself. You'll be re-using a lot of these calls, no sense baking them into all your interactions
Get up on SCORM Packaging .. much of this has to be defined at author time. Lots of reading, and a lot of features you need to pick thru if your customers even use. Don't dev in places that have .1% market need. The low hanging fruit get you to market.
Surround yourself with passionate great people. You'll need them.
As far as the standards go, it's all about portability. SCORM works directly with a LMS if thats where your customer goes. Others use a LRS which is coded to work with one they set at author time. You can even do both.
Aside from React and MongoDB, you'll need something that can do the lift and shift of all this content.
I have recently attempted to generate reports in Silverlight 4. In my problem domain, these reports either need to go directly to the printer and/or the client-side SL application creates a PDF and allows the user to store it somewhere.
As for the report, it's roughly composed of 50% flow text (incl. enumerations), 30% tables and 20% charts. The flow text part makes it slighty more challenging, as proper line breaking would have to take place.
So far, I have tried the following approaches - each with its own shortcomings that make them not so much feasible:
Silverlight's own PrintDocument: technically, there are two major concerns. For one, getting page breaks to work and printing UIElements on it with proper layout is a bit of a dirty hackjob and full of compromises; thankfully that's the part I've managed to get working so far. However, the PrintDocument class always renders all visuals as bitmaps before sending them off; this is not so much fun, if one uses a PDF printer and hopes to still be able to search in / select text. David Poll's approach in "Silverlight and Beyond" [1] wasn't that helpful as well as it inherently follows the same approach and thus suffers from very similar issues.
silverPDF [2]: a barely documented library that requires to do most of the layout manually (the former approach at least allowed me to re-use Silverlight's layouting engine). So far, I see no way to (for instance) measure paragraphs and the only sample with long flowtext uses hardcoded absolute values for layout rectangles. Also, the developing party seems to be inactive.
Personally, I'm now thinking of following an entirely different strategy: simply generate HTML documents. But I was hoping that the community here might have hints for the two approaches above or know other good approaches.
Thanks in advance,
~Manny
Do you need to generate the report on the client, or can you get the server to generate it? Your options are better if you can generate it on the server. Personally, I think the way Silverlight printing works at the moment is pretty poor for report usage (sending each page to the printer as raster rather than vector, resulting in potentially huge amounts of data travelling through the network, and lower printing quality output). I've found the best strategy is to generate the PDF on the server (enabling you to take advantage of a reporting engine), and display it in your application. There are also a few commercial products (such as Telerik's Silverlight Report Viewer, Report Sharp Shooter, or even First Floor Software's Document Toolkit). If a client side solution is really required, perhaps one of these might be the best option (although the printing quality will still be poor). Note that Silverlight 5 is supposed to have support for vector printing, but it's another 6 months or more away from release. Yet another option is Pete Brown and David Poll's open source reporting framework here: http://silverlightreporting.codeplex.com/.
If you want to take the option of generating the report on the server as a PDF and displaying it in your application, I've written an article on doing so here: http://www.silverlightshow.net/items/Building-a-Silverlight-Line-Of-Business-Application-Part-6.aspx. This doesn't work for OOB applications, but the source code accompanying my book (Pro Business Applications with Silverlight 4) does: apress.com/book/view/9781430272076.
Hope this helps...
Chris Anderson
I want to develop something with a control like this :
Bing Maps Control
Is there something advisable and for free ?
Preliminarily I will use it for education but later on It's gonna be for production.
The Bing Maps Control is free as far as I know. But, if you want to use arbitrary tile sources, try Deep Earth
There are several consideration based on your needs.
1. Do you want to use a commercial control and platform?
If you want to use a commercial platform (like Bing Maps), you have to look at the various licence options that are associated to the platform. Take a look at the various licence type so you can get the appropriate one if you want to: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff428642.aspx
Also, if it's used in an education use case at the first place, you can see in the Terms of Use if you can fall in this case: http://www.microsoft.com/maps/product/terms.html
When moving to production, you will be able to use the control for free for a limited period, limited transactions and depending on your use case (see the licence link and please report to the Terms of use to see if your case fits in the free commercial licence).
2. Do you want to use a specific technology?
If you really want to use the Silverlight control, you can take a look at the DeepEarth project on CodePlex, see here: http://deepearth.codeplex.com/ or you can consider to get inspiration from this project and develop your own extension based on the MultiScaleImage control of Silverlight.
If you don't want to use a particular technology (plugin), you might consider using the Leaflet library to display the map: http://leafletjs.com/
In every cases here, you might consider having some additionnal cost to get access to tiles (Bing's, OSM hosted tiles or whatever service) might require licence to get access to the tiles in your control. You could use your own server to host your own generated tile.
We used this and it worked well for us since we were looking for a zooming/panning solution, but not for maps.
There is an open project www.openstreetmap.org, and I think that it is in long term best choice.
You can install data for whole world or just countries you need on your server, there is accurate data update ... Or you can use maps from main server, get embeddable HTML etc.
I'm communicating with a logic analyzer (HP 1660A) over RS232. I issue a command which tells the analyzer to print screen its display and send it over to the controller (my pc) through serial communication. I'm saving the result (which is usually abut 25kB) to my computer and I would like to view it as a TIFF or other format. The problem is that the response from the analyzer comes in PCL format, therefore suitable to be sent to a printer and printed directly, but not to be opened as an image. I have tried a few PCL to image converters to do the job, I found one which does it properly, however I've used the trial version and I am reluctant to purchase it. I've given you the background of my labour. I would appreciate any kind of help, a reference to the commands in pcl 1 and what should I do in order to extract the data and format it properly from the PCL file. I have no experience with PCL and image processing whatsoever, so please, give me a hand here. Thank you.
P.S. I've obtained the PCL file from the analyzer, both in C# and matlab... I have one slight problem in C# with the serial port control, some images have some uninterpreted characters in the image, when using the above converters. I say all these because I need an algorithm or some indications, no matter the programming language, so please feel free to post.
PCL is complex to read. There are only a handful of tools out there that do a good job of this. We have lots of PCL expertise and still often look to other to supply conversion to PDF and other formats. If the PCL is quite simple, that is, just text, a few fonts, and a graphic or two, a couple of RegEx commands could deal with the extraction of the text and then you could mock up a new document using whatever tools you wish.
Looking at these files in stackoverflow might be tough. If you can get them on an ftp and post a link I can take a quick look and post my findings/thoughts here. The other option is to look to an outside tool. There are a few we've had success with. Our needs are broad so I've settled on one that works the best with many different PCL streams (some PCL coding is better than others). As you are dealing with a known quantity of PCL you may have a few options. Here are a few we've used and had some success with (in order of usefulness to us)
PCLWorks by PageTech (they have a GUI viewer and complete SDK)
VeryPDF PCL Converter (command line tool)
SwiftView
There are others, and even an opensource variant of Ghostscript that handles PCL (we've never had much luck as the PCL we use often contains very custom fonts, symbol sets, and tons of macros which seem to choke it.
GhostPCL
EDIT: Most recently we've been working with LincPDF (http://www.lincolnco.com/). This is also an excellent product with has one big benefit, deployment is simple. Some of the other tools have complex software installations. This solution is very easy for us to deploy as a feature in an application. It's also faster then any tools we've tested to date (at least with the PCL that we generate from our apps which is quite complex as they include specialized fonts and macros).
According to the spec sheet for the HP 1660 (pdf) series can send the TIFF,PCX and postscript.
Wouldn't it be easier to use TIFF?
The project was put on hold for a while, but I would like to offer a complete and usable solution.
#Adrian
You can save the image to a floppy disk, I've done that, saved it as TIFF and everything worked fine. Unfortunately, it sends only PCL through RS232. The idea to save the print screen over serial communication was to avoid using too much the floppy disk, which the device uses in order to boot.
#Douglas
Thank you for your elaborate answer. I'll take a look at the indicated tools, however, my desire is to offer a complete front-end solution, which yields directly the graphic. I've put some files from my tests here in order to see the complexity of the PCL constructions. Do you have any knowledge of a possible API that I could integrate into my application, which can parse the file and interpret the PCL?
Regards,
Cosmin
We capture the serial input via a serial spooler that watches COM1:. It's called SSpool.exe. It redirects the PCL as input to PCLXForm. PCLXForm converts it into any raster format (TIFF, JPG, PDF, BMP, etc.) However, we can also extract the text during the conversion and we can extract individual raster objects from the PCL for re-arrangement in the downstream application. Our pricing model is positioned for licensee's that need to convert up to 50,000 pages of invoices into indexed PDF's per month. However, this type of application normally requires a custom license in order to get our pricing down to the level required. In order to do so, we often have to restrict our product to convert unlimited files, but only up to the 20th page within any one PCL print file. That provides enough page volume and gives us the ability to reduce the pricing per unit. To demo, you would need the PCLTool SDK.
While working on a tool that allows to exchange images of several third-party applications and thus creating individual "skins" for those applications, I have stumbled across a jpg-format about which I cannot seem to find any decent informations.
When looking at it in a hex-editor, it starts with the tag "CF10". Searching the internet has only provided a tool that is able to handle these kind of files, without any additional informations.
Does anyone have any further informations about this type of jpg-format?
file(1) should give you some useful information. You can also use ImageMagick's identify(1) program (optionally with the -verbose option) to get even more details about the file. See the example on that page for a good idea of what information it provides.
You could also try and see what the Droid identification tool says about that file.
CF stands for "Compression Factor". CF-10 means factor ten, and I don't think it's different from any "standard" jpeg.
DROID gives it as being a "JTIP (JPEG Tiled Image Pyramid)". Some info from http://www.bcr.org/cdp/digitaltb/digital_imaging/formats.html :
JTIP (JPEG Tiled Image Pyramid) is similar to GridPrix. It offers multiple layers of higher and higher resolutions. Each layer is further divided into tiles. A user can zoom into these tiles, or request a corresponding tile at a higher resolution.