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I'm maintaining a site that has thousands of images that have not been compressed nearly enough. The homepage weighs in at 1.5 Mb currently, and it could easily be way less that half that.
I'm looking for some kind of tool that'll take a folder full of JPG pictures and will recompress them to their "optimal" compression value.
Obviously, "optimal lossy compression setting" is an oxymoron, but I'm thinking maybe a tool that'll try different levels and compare the outputs to the input, and choose a "sweet spot" between size and destruction?
Or even try whether PNG is a better option, many times it is, for "drawing" type stuff.
Does anyone of you know any such tool?
I'd have lots of fun coding one, but I bet someone already did and will save me 2 days.
Alternatively, of course, anything that'll take all pictures in a folder and recompress them with a fixed quality level (say, 40) will also work, it'll just not make my inner nerd as happy, but it'll solve my problem just fine.
(Ideally something that can run on Windows, ideally from the command line)
Thank you!
I used ImageMagick for that purpose. It consist of a lot of things, among which a set of commandline tools that can be used to chain image operations along each other.
It is fun to experiment on the commandline, copy it in a script and let it rip over a couple thousand images. I found the default quality of the resulting images also pretty good.
Here is the website. I used it under Linux, but I saw there is a windows version too.
If you are looking for a non-programming approach (kind of the wrong idea here on SO...) you could try IrfanView's batch feature. It's a lightweight image editor that will let you batch convert images based on a few simple criteria (such as file dimensions, etc.)
For optimizing png's, pngout is king
http://icompressor.blogspot.in/ Mass Image Compressor does the job of doing compression of all the images in single folder. It doesn't have command line arg or intelligent mechanism to automatically decide compression levels but it provides you a sample compression to give you feel of compression based on compression parameters that you have set.
In the past I faced this problem, and found a way to compress JPEG images. This answer cannot help you compress PNG or other formats, but JPEG.
I found that Windows XP's MS Paint app is wonderful for this purpose. It compresses a JPEG image very nicely without any visible loss. So, I wrote a utility to mass compress the files. Here is the link: AutoSavePaint 1.7.0.2
It has helped few a people since it was published. I hope it helps you too! :)
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I have a series of pictures from some old documents which I want to digitize them and convert them to excel file or other things like this.what is the best way to do this?
Depending on the pictures you are using, you might want to consider looking into a toolkit that supports both scanning in images and OCRing them such as the LEADTOOLS Document SDK, which has TWAIN and WIA scanning features for scanning in the document images as well as OCR features can be used to convert images into document formats. As I work with the vendor of this toolkit, I can suggest a number of approaches to improve OCR recognition of the text in your images, if this is indeed something that is suitable for you.
But without knowing more details, it is difficult to give a precise answer for what you need. You should provide more information when posting a question like this. For example, describing the input pictures in more details, giving examples on what exactly they are and how do you expect to handle them, as well as elaborating on the outline of the final Excel output you are seeking.
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i have an Educational website and i create always pdf files from my learning and ad them for download
but there is many learchers that download my files and reupload them somewhere else
i used google dmca but is there any way to Prevent from re-uploading my files?
One way is to use your .htaccess to prevent hotlinking, but even if you do that, you'll again have the problem that when someone views the document via an in-browser extension (e.g. Adobe Reader, Foxit PDF Reader), they can save it and you've lost control over what they can do with it. Or, depending on how you've set up your site, they can simply directly download it, leaving you again back at square one.
Hence, the solution is to bypass direct access to the document. And, there are a number of ways to do that, which varies based on technique and web software (platform) used.
However, since you didn't mention a particular platform or technology: you can use web controllers (MVC type controllers) to broker the dynamic viewing and displaying of the documents in tandem with a client-side tool / plugin to do the displaying for you (much like Scribd).
However, Scribd uses a proprietary Flash PDF viewer called iPaper, and while it isn't available for use, you can find many other alternatives on the web. One that comes highly recommended (there's even a tag on SO for it) is FlexPaper, an open source plugin that implements a client-side web-based PDF viewer - which I think will suit your needs perfectly (from here):
This project provides a light weight document viewer component
enabling PDF files to be viewed without having any PDF reader software
installed. This project provides both Flex library and stand-alone web
version.
Here are some demos of it in action:
http://flexpaper.devaldi.com/demo/
Sorry, by mistake posted partial comment. Anyway...
Why do you afraid of reuploading of your files ? Put links to original site into the PDF and get profit of this. More copies, more downloads, more popularity for your resource. If you indeed would like to make PDFs available from your site only, you have to hide files from users and provide some functionality to read them from your web site only (you can use existing sites of this type). That makes duplicating of your resources to be harder task, but be ready that many users reject to read it this way.
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I want to create a GUI driven application for a micro-controller (Atmel XMEGA) that is connected to a 128x64 dots graphics LCD (EA DOGL128-6) and 4 buttons for navigation.
Controlling the display itself (e.g. drawing pixels and characters) is no problem but in order to prevent me from reinventing the wheel I was googling for a GUI-Library/-Toolkit that is written in c, includes its source code, will run on a 32 MHz 8-bit micro-controller and provides at least the following controls:
panel (to group elements)
menu (scrollable)
icon
label
button
line-graph (optional)
But I didn't find any thing useful. Does anyone know (or better uses) such a library(preferably for free)?
I would consider rolling your own "immediate mode" GUI. Jari Komppa has a good tutorial about them. It's a lot easier than you may think, and you'll probably find most GUI libraries--even those targeting embedded systems--are a bit heavy-weight for your system.
If you insist on using a third-party library, below are a few I found. I've never used any of them and they are probably fairly expensive.
emWin
C/PEG
easyGUI
I personally used PEG (at work), but it is not for free. You just need to write a small layer of adaptation and use it. You can also look at Qt or minigui.
I also wrote a library which supports nearly any display technology: µGUI
http://www.embeddedlightning.com/ugui/
µGUI is a free and open source graphic library for embedded systems. It is platform-independent and can be easily ported to almost every micro-controller system. As long as the display is capable of showing graphics, µGUI is not restricted to a certain display technology. Therefore display technologies such as LCD, TFT, E-Paper, LED or OLED are supported. The whole module consists of two files: ugui.c and ugui.h.
This might be helpful as well
You should take a look at Contiki [wikipedia.org]
Besides being a small and elegant operating system for many 8/16/32-bit microcontrollers, it also features a GUI toolkit. It runs on the Atmel AVR!
For your convenience, here is a direct link to the The Contiki Toolkit (CTK) source code.
In addition to Judge Maygarden's list RAMTEX provide libraries specifically aimed at small graphic LCDs. Again not free, but is this is for commercial use, remember that if you did it yourself, it may take many man hours to achieve a polished product, so consider that before building your own.
At the rates my company accounts for my time (as opposed to my pay rate), if it took more than five hours, I'd be better off buying the Ramtex library (about two days if you only take my pay rate into account). If however you have the time and inclination, it is not a difficult task, and probably fun.
Rich Quinnell mentions
"... I saw a demonstration of Java applications running on an STM32-F3 MCU..."
http://www.microcontrollercentral.com/author.asp?section_id=1741&doc_id=253618
I guess it is what you are looking for?
Atmel (now owned by Microchip) actually makes a GUI library targeted at their microcontrollers.
This is part of the now called Microchip® Advanced Software Framework.
You may want to have a look at the Nano-X framework (formerly known as Microwindows): http://www.microwindows.org/
It claims to support down to a 16-bit DOS system, so I'm not sure if it's suitable for an 8-bit, but maybe the library can be pared down to just what you need.
I haven't used it, but at one point was considering looking into using it for some simple display UI (though on a 32-bit ARM system). Unfortunately, the project shifted gears before I actually did anything with it. I'd be interested in what your take on it is (or how well it works if you decide to try to use it).
We've started using easyGui and it seems good. You design the screens in a PC app then it generates the source code - making the design stage really easy.
It does most of the things on the list. Line graphs are coming soon. You can make up buttons pretty easily as reusable structures.
It comes with template drivers for lots of displays - depending on how closely the template matches your display (colour depth & interface are the biggest issues) you might be able to use the code unmodified or change it to suit.
I have been working on a similar project. Closest thing I could find are in the following links, but I doubt you will find a library with all the features you desire. These will only setup basic drawing functions, but it's a start. There are also some useful tools for bitmap converting and font creators if you dig around.
http://www.siwawi.arubi.uni-kl.de/avr_projects/arm_projects/glcd_dcf77/index.html
http://en.radzio.dxp.pl/
Almost everything else I have seen here is way overkill for what the poster seems to be asking for.
The CodeVisionAVR development environment now has graphical libraries for XMEGA.
The CodeVisionAVR C Compiler features a powerful graphic library for
LCDs with resolutions from 84x48 up to 800x480 pixels.
However, it is not free.
You can use the "Microchip Graphics Library" for free.
This includes GUI tool "Graphics Display Designer X" for designing screens and this outputs the "C" files for your designed screen.
I am using this tool which is very user friendly, but some of the widgets what you are looking you may not find.
Here is the link for GUI tool:
Click here!
NuttX is a real-time operating system for microcontrollers. The author has starting a developing some gui primitives for LCD displays for it.
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I need a simple graphics C library to use on a device where I will be writing directly to the frame.
The frame is located in regular memory.
There is no graphics acceleration hardware.
Nothing fancy. I just want to be able to draw lines, circles, OSD stuff like strings as well.
It would be nice to have functions that use good, lean algorithms (my CPU is an ARM9 running at 400MHz).
What are some recommendations for this?
For very simple needs (lines, circles, polygons, text) I have always just made my own. Check out bresenham's algorithm for lines and circles, Wu's modifications for antialiasing on circles and lines.
Gimp will output C code for images, which is what I do for fonts, and drawing them is pretty easy. I have used anti-aliasing (gimp --> grayscale, use the grayscale value as the alpha), but haven't done proportional fonts. They aren't much harder, and can make the display a bit nicer, but I haven't needed them yet.
Polygons are simply multiple lines, and filled polygons are quite fun to implement.
It's not a lot of work, and you'll grow from the experience.
If, however, you decide you want to render SVG or some other complex vector language, then a library is in order. But for simple things, this isn't complex.
-Adam
I'd like to second OpenGL, especially the OpenGL|ES variant.
Here is a link to a Software based OpenGL-Renderer: http://sourceforge.net/projects/ogl-es
I've spend the last three years writing commercial software rasterization codes on ARM9 and similar processors, so I think I can comment on use of cairo and other high level APIs:
They work very well and are incredible powerfull, but on a target as limited as an ARM9 you will never be happy with the performance. The graphic libs are written with your typical Desktop PC in mind, and they trade precision for performance. This is nice for high quality SVG rendering, but to slow on a humble ARM.
The Vincent OpenGL|ES I've suggested above has a on the fly dynamic code generation engine for ARM-CPUs in place, so you get almost the performance of hand-optimized assembler code.
If you can limit yourself to just one bitmap-format, just two blend-modes and a hand full of rendering primitives you may get better performance by writing a dozen of render-routines yourself. Depending on your experience and requirements that can take anything from two days to a month though..
Cairo is pretty powerful and easy to use. I think Mozilla uses it as the basis for the <canvas> element and the SVG renderer.
From your requirements it appears you need something like an embedded framebuffer library (or whatever it is called). I played around with some of the following a few years back for an embedded browser (which didn't make it to the market). Unfortunately, I can't remember much to give you any analysis. Have a look:
DirectFB
GTK/X (or a port using directFB)
Cairo (as another poster has suggested -- this is very powerful)
Also, this article may be of interest.
Try SDL. From the web page:
Simple DirectMedia Layer is a cross-platform multimedia library designed to provide low level access to audio, keyboard, mouse, joystick, 3D hardware via OpenGL, and 2D video framebuffer. It is used by MPEG playback software, emulators, and many popular games, including the award winning Linux port of "Civilization: Call To Power."
OPenGL has a set of 2d functions, not sure if it is too bloated for you or if it can be trimmed down. It is written in C, at least.
I found the Adafruit GFX library to my liking.
Very very simple and basic:
https://github.com/adafruit/Adafruit-GFX-Library
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Second Life is fun to play with, and some developers are creating content there, but I was wondering what useful resources (if any) are available in Second Life for professional software developers.
Discussion groups
Education/training
Vendor support
Development-related presentations or demos
Professional contacts
To clarify: I'm not really looking for information on developing stuff for use in Second Life (although those answers are welcome). I am looking for pointers to stuff in SL that programmers would find useful for their real-life work.
They have a site about some of these uses: http://secondlifegrid.net/programs/api/
and some pages on the language they kind of grew: http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/LSL_Portal
Like you I find playing around with SL pretty interesting for recreational coding. One of the experiences that made me think there was something to it was trying to code a working clock in a sandbox (a general building area in SL). Other avatars would walk past and make suggestions and as there's a fair few coders around it soon turned into an interesting collaborative effort. If only it was that simple in RL. Some things just work really neatly in SL - I once implemented a swarming algorithm using a flock of 'birds' as the objects (which gives a whole new take on oops).
As to resources - assuming you're beyond basic coding level then you should be able to figure most things out from the LSL Wiki - http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/LSL_Portal.
There's an ebook - "Scripting Recipes for Second Life" by Jeff Heaton which covers the basics in a reasonably well laid out way. It's only a few dollars but probably only worth it if you've not done a great deal of coding elsewhere. There's also regular classes held in-world, but I believe most of these are at a pretty basic level.
For groups I've always found the Scripters of Second Life group very helpful with a lot of people generally on it. There's one called simply Scripts which is quite active too.
A couple of words of warning, LSL, whilst Turing-complete is pretty broken in several areas, lacks modern program constructs (and some older ones - like arrays!) and much of the 'black-art' of LSL is knowing how to work around the limitations, With the advent of Mono though this is likely to be a decreasing issue.
Also there does seem to be an assumption by the Lindens that if you want to do any 'heavy-lifting' code you'll do it on a server off-world and call and return results to/from SL. This isn't helped by the XMP-RPC implementation being very broken, although HTTP works fine (and generally better than might be expected).
I vaguely remember Dr Dobbs running some sort of ongoing "Programmer's Island" thingy in SL, but I can't find the reference right now.
Apparently some sort of "virtual conference" for software developers.
As far I'm concerned, I'm trying to contribute to the OpenSim project which is a OpenSource clone of the SecondLife server infrastructure, written in C# and Mono.
OpenSim is SL like, enhanced with many additional script commands, open grid protocols, with customized modules and plugins. It definitely worth a look if you dont already heard about it.
ControlBreak suggested this in a comment (I'm promoting it to an answer):
You can visit Microsoft Island. Presentations of new products are done regularly - http://www.kzero.co.uk/blog/?p=663#more-663
IBM, Microsoft and Sun are pretty active in Second Life and sometimes there are interesting presentations/demos to see. Some of those are great for networking and meeting people from those companies which work on products you're interested in.
There are several groups for Java, PHP and several other programming languages apart from LSL, however IMO they're not as good resource as other non-SL resources. You can get your questions answered more quickly on StackOverflow or IRC.
IBM held several interesting programming competitions - there was something with robots finding a way out of the maze by IBM, there are also robot wars and some other programming competitions in SL, however they are all LSL-oriented.
I think I saw a beginner PHP class once, so if you're interested in learning programming language from start, try searching events and you might find something; however those are pretty rare in my experience.
Look & Feel team Scripting, it's mine. Common 3D trouble is confusing camera center between camera or actor. A designer may think camera center is world when it should be actor.