One thing that one of our applications needs is a scanned signature of an officer of the organization using our program, for putting onto the tax receipts it generates. We have specific requirements for that - it has to be exactly 166 x 39 pixels, or any exact multiple of that size.
Not all of the users of our software have the expertise to do the minimal image editing to crop a scanned signature file to that size, and we really don't see it as our job to do it for them! So I'm thinking about whether we could include some functionality in the program to allow them to fairly easily do it.
What I'm imagining is something that allows them to select and display and image file, zoom it an scroll through it if necessary, and use a rectangle that we draw above it, with the 166 x 39 pixel dimensions, to specify the part they want to crop out, and have it save the cropped file with a new name. They would also have to be able to zoom that cropping definition rectangle to multiples of its size if they wanted or needed to crop a larger section.
Can anyone suggest what sort of external tools or APIs we would need to add to be able to achieve that sort of thing? I suspect most of it can be done up to the point where the cropping is done, just by some careful PowerScript programming.
One other thing that I can imagine might be needed (particularly for a 2nd image file that the application needs, for the user organization's logo) is extending an existing image file with white space one one side or another. The logo has to be 150 x 60 pixels, or a multiple of that, and if the user's existing logo file is for instance square, it would obviously have to be extended. So that's another thing that I expect would need help from an external API of some sort.
Suggestions? If the suggestion is for a commercial product, it would have to have a reasonable price, royalty-free distribution, and not add too many MB to the since of our installer.
Thanks.
Do you know of any way to resize / scale, etc. using an InkEdit. (in 2009 we used a Kodac ocx which came with windows xp or 95, but no longer is freely available).
That is why in my last three PB & PowerServer web applications before I joined Appeon, I used the DWO's Ink Edit control. Then all you need to do is set the DWO's Zoom factor and "volia!", any size / scale your users need including the Ink Image. ;-)
DC.Modify("DataWindow.Zoom='200'") // for example
Food for thought;
Regards ... Chris