Hi Alex,

great to hear that you are approaching the image region plugin. Yes, a dialog box would be fine, also a context menu option would do. Just some more thoughts on what might be worth doing:

• enable true region clones (Ctrl drag now creates a new region with reference to the same temporary file. Any edits in the source image will affect the clone and vice versa. When saving and re-opening the file, then the images are independent, but you don't want to close and re-open just for cloning an image)
  
• have some sort of preference setting for the image format, for the editor and for display of border and input placeholder. Currently, I need to switch the standard program for png in windows to paint, which isn't really appropriate outside SMath.
  
• You might provide submenu entries in the Insert menu:
  Insert> Image> New png
  Insert> Image> New svg
  Insert> Image> Region with placeholder
  The first two would then come without border and with input display switched off.
  
• In order not to clutter the Insert menu, backwards compatibility would be fine. Otherwise we would need to have the old and the new image region in parallel.
  

-

My dear friend:
Quite natural two Canadians don't speak "same Canadian Languages" ,
Scotish, Irish, English, French, Quebecois, Amerindian +++ other but not Canadians.
*.PNG, TIFF, BMP are bitmap. As they appear in the screen you can select/copy
to clipboard paste in Paint, IrfanView, Tracer, Wingrab, 2020 ...
If I draw something in http://editor.method.ac/#copy an SVG creator, I can't
copy to clipboard , only view in Microsoft Viewer because *.svg are not bitmap.
They reside within themselves as scalable data . Bitmap are zoomable but not
scalable. Smath imports *.bmp, PNG but not svg.

Attach your work sheet that imports svg.

The other way around is to go back few days ago and get Bézier/deCasteljau from
Dave Carpi made working from my desperate attempt. There would be a limit in
Smath of how much you can draw... The example is scalable and rotatable. Each
piece drawn is individually scalable and rotatable, each piece plot in Smath QuickPlot
in default color as different layer. Each layer can be located at will [must confirm
that to myself].

Each user as priority, mine is rather Smath be more maths [+ built-in functions,
increase speed of calculations, less tricky things to calculate, save work sheet settings
... etc] . Smath is defficient of "fft" 2D, 3D , plot stem ...

Jean

As a former Consultant [now retired]. I could dream of a software drawing
my process flow diagram and include the savant maths [Laplace ...].
Thinking of MasterCam [$ 30000 in 2005]
Thinking Maple [$ 4000] and not friendly, then add Mathcad Prime for what
it worths. My gear is expensive and nobody has dared coding all those
complex gears. LabView has something interesting in that dream, but too
limited for a big operating plant. LabView is not freeware.
AutoCad 11 was given 2 millions $ CAN by QuebecHydro to develop the
layer system. Bad luck, for the project I was involved, we had to
design all our Instrumentation stuff: two jobs in one.

Jean

Martin,

So far, so good - I actually managed to complete selection between .svg & .png in one evening ! Which means till midnight - its 11:37pm right now . Maybe I am better at this than I though haha. Svg still does not scale if height/width is defined - need a workaround.

Plugin .dll is attached, right click on image region to select file format.

Roadmap:

2. Proper resizing of .svg image - currently .svg does not scale if height/width is set

3. Enable true region clones - should not be hard if there is a way for region to know it is being copied (not sure how to check that)

4. have some sort of preference setting for the image format, for the editor..... This is a little bit beyound my coding capabilities; if someone is willing to guide me here I would try. My work around for choosing default PNG editor is to set it to "Windows Photo Viewer", and the click "Open" menu at the top right - all possible program choices are there - you can pick one you like.

5. Additional raster file format with layers, is .ora a good choice?

Off to sleep

Forgot to attach ALL the .dll files, my mistake. Here is the full set
ImageRegion2016-01-29.zip (279kb) downloaded 34 time(s).

Edited by user 29 January 2016 19:03:01(UTC)  | Reason: Not specified

Alex,

great to see that you don't let you get pushed off track and seem to be robust against friendly fire ;-)

I need to re-activate my knowledge on how and where to manually install plugins.

Indeed, the plugin can only scale svgs if they don't contain size information. In gnuplot (which is used by the maxima plugin) we found settings to suppress the size information, such that Maxima svg plots can be resized.

It is also possible to manually edit the svg file and remove the size tags (don't remember which that were but remember that it was possible). If you anyways store the file in the smath document, then you might have the chance to clean up the file.

Don't know ora, thus I don't really miss it.

IPE can create pdf and has layers plus uses latex for embedded math stuff. Thus displaying pdf images might be an option. However, I don't know how many users would appreciate that. If I want to have a nice figure, I use IPE generated pdfs (currently just screenshots to transfer them to smath), quick and dirty images (free body diagrams and the like) are produced in png via image region. Annotations are made by overlaid math regions, this gives a nice consistant look and feel.

Something that was always annoying with the image region was the choice of image size. I did't find a way to tell paint in what size to create the image. It would, of course, be convenient to use the actual image region size. This would be a real leap forward in the image region usability. Currently, what I do is:
- open paint from image region
- do the drawing, rezize the canvas in paint, save the file
- context menu: set to original size
- context menu: border off
- context menu: input placeholder off

Perhaps, it is possible to initialize the region with a white image of region-controlled size and give that to paint for further editing. I understand, however, that your priority is svg support.

Another thought on choosing external applications: How about using a shell script (batch file) to do the appropriate call? You would just use the .bat file with an appropriate temporary file name and the script would then bifurcate to the appropriate program. Setting the preferences then just means changing the script. Perhaps this might reside in the plugin directory.

Martin

Martin, forgot to mention the important bit - right click on empty region and click "insert blank .svg or png". This conceptually made sense to me - you insert an empty region and than you either point it to a path, or create a blank. Even the error is logical - till you "fill" the image there is nothing there.

Edited by user 29 January 2016 21:14:30(UTC)  | Reason: Not specified

So it seems that google drive was playing tricks with me - I have attached a previously overwritten version of image.dll.

I have confirmed the archive below to work on two computers so far. My apologies for confusion

ImageRegion.001.zip (271kb) downloaded 45 time(s).

This was done for both .png and .svg. Resize the image region before inserting blank file and here you go! See attached.


ImageRegion.002.zip (283kb) downloaded 36 time(s).

Something that was always annoying with the image region was the choice of image size. I did't find a way to tell paint in what size to create the image. It would, of course, be convenient to use the actual image region size.

This was done for both .png and .svg. Resize the image region before inserting blank file and here you go! See attached.

_____________________________________

Alex,

If you are willing to go back to square 0, it will surely result to interesting suggestions.
An image that you paste in Smath, paste from Paint, Irfanview, Wingrab ... is totally dead stuff.
The image region you can zoom from some unknow gadget, probably Microsoft. That kind of zoom is
just crap because is does not interpolate based on Fourier "fft". What it does, it random place
rows/cols and puts adjacent pixel value.
If Smath reads an image from file [READRGB], whether grayscale or RGB, this is a much different story.
You can open in image region like pasted from Paint. You can extract the RGB matrices.
At this point, you can digitize to get XY coordinates. The Mathcad digitizing tool is RemToDo for Samth.
You can digitize from not free software [> $ 600]. Once you have extracted what you want [assuming it can
be done either Pro $ or free Smath], you can linterp XY for a neat trace in Smath quick plot. Then remake
an image save in file and reopen in Smath READRGB.
If you have an image and intend to do some image processing in Smath, just forget it. Smath does not have
the picture operator, and I never found one in the web. Smath does not have "fft".

Read me there: If your "image" is a drawing, you can capture from Paint Print Screen or Wingrab.
At this point, if the image is of reasonable size, you can paste in "Tracer" and collect point by point
what is of interest. That will give XY coordinates that you could but not sure paste in vector Smath,
plot and remake an image from Smath quick plot, of the desired size, remake an image and replot in
Smath region. You will surely have to WRITE/READ the XY to file because Smath is dead for copy/paste
vector to other applications.

"Tracer" was freeware from Markus Karolwesky [Edmonton, Canada]. I have the original version and the last
version. A stand alone tools *.EXE. It was public, no limit in distributing. It is a gorgeous manual
digitizing tool, most precious in many Mathcad/Mathsoft projects. Mathsoft seeing me using that tool,
they offered a short version program, works well on clean image.

If Smath could "Print to File", you could probably open *.PDF, you will not have that many zoom options
PDF readers. Good PDF is only from Adobe, that can't be purchased, only monthly location.

Do you have massive projects ? digitize a web graph? image processing? SVG art image factory...

Attach your image with brief decription of what to do. You just have *.dll and zipped.
Sorry Alex, I just don't understand what you are attempting.

Jean

Hi Jean,

You sound like you have some great ideas (i.e. matrix representation of the image, its manipulation, display and stuff).

Thing is that it is not what I am after. As crude as it is I just need to get freehand sketches into my calcbooks, and paint.net/inkscape is the simplest way to create them. Image region just shows it in SMath; this was always its original intention. And it is 95% there in this regard (i.e. I need to spend minimum hours to get it work).

Jean, if you feel you can take on your idea I (and the rest of community) can help you to get starting on plugin creation for what you want. It was not hard for a guy like me (who never coded before), it will not be hard for you. Keep in mind that SMath does not like huge matrices - try to get 2000x2000 matrix and display it / perform operations.

If we want to discuss your idea of reading / displaying RGB matrix further lets create separate thread though - the image region does not seem to be what you are after.