SoftArtisans ImgWriter

New in V1.3.0
New Installer

New in V1.2.2
Issues Addressed:

• AddWatermark and MergeWithImage don't return correct result with a PNG file.

New in V1.2
New Features:

• New property: ImageGen.AntiAliasFactor smoothes the jagged edges of diagonal lines and curves.
• New property: ImageGen.BufferResponse allows you to turn ASP response buffering on and off.

New in V1.1.6
New Features:

• 'AntiAlias' property
  -- support for antialiasing: default is saAntiAlisaNone(0) type is SAAntiAliasFactor
  SAAntiAlisaFactor values: saAntiAliasNone = 0, saAntiAliasGood = 2, saAntiAliasBest = 4, saAntiAliasHigh = 6, saAntiAliasHighest = 8

The higher the AntiAliasFactor, the more memory this funciton requires and the slower it will be. 'saAntiAliasBest' is the recommended value.

• NOTE: When AntiAliasFactor is used, the dimensions of the text rectangle are determined by the font. When AntiAliasFactor is not used, the text rectangle is calculated based on the top, left, height, and width parameters passed to 'DrawTextOnImage' 'BufferResponse' property
• default is 'false'
• turns ASP buffering on and off
• There is an issue with IE where a refresh of a page will fail if ImgWriter is streaming an image to the browser. It appears that IE cannot handle a refresh of a page that is send to it using 'chunked' transfer encoding. Netscape handles the refresh without problem. The response is sent to the browser using 'chunked' transfer encoding if ASP buffering is turned off. Previously, ImgWriter turned ASP buffering off automatically. This property allows a user to turn buffering on and allow refreshes to succeed as a cost of higher memory utilization on the server.

New in V1.1.5
Issues Addressed:

• When saving an image in GIF format, 'White'(0x00ffffff) would sometimes be made transparent when the 'TransparentColor' property was not set. This has been fixed in version 1.1.5.
• Some issues with documentation are corrected.

New in V1.1.4
New Features:

• ImageGen.ResizeImage() -- When you wish to resize an image and maintain proportions, but at the same time insure that one dimension is set to an exact value, pass in '0' as the parameter for the other dimension.

New in V1.1.3
New Features:

• New ImageGen properties - DPIx, DPIy, and DPIunits - allow you to set or return horizontal/vertical dots per inch, centimeter, or meter.

New in V1.1.2
Issues Addressed:

• ImageGen's 'DrawTextOnImage' method would incorrectly render text containing certain characters, such as '&'.

New in V1.1.1
Issues Addressed:

• ImageGen's 'SaveImage' method would fail under ASP when saving to a file and a variable was used for the 'SaveData' parameter.

New in Version 1.1.0

• Loading an image into SoftArtisans.Images from a variant byte array caused and exception. This bug has been fixed in the new version

Sophisticated image processing, creation, management and caching.

Features and Benefits

• Create thumbnails from existing images
• Height-to-width ratio is maintained automatically
• Three resize algorithms are supported to optimize speed and image quality
• Add watermarks to your images
• Generate charts in ASP pages
• Write dynamic captions on your images
• Adjust image size for faster Web downloads
• Turn photo negatives into color positives
• Merge two images
• Create labels
• Increase you Web site's performance by caching frequently served images
• Manage images from database blobs

SoftArtisans ImgWriter contains two server-side COM components:

• SAImageGen offers image manipulation functionality, such as image resizing, image cropping, and writing text on an image. SAImgGen lets you create thumbnails from larger images or add watermarks to existing images. It exposes low-level methods for precise image manipulation. The component can also be used to construct new images, such as charts, labels, or banners. SAImageGen supports the nine most common image formats, including jpeg, bmp, emf, png, and tiff. It can read and save images to and from a file on disk, and in-memory byte array, or a database blob. It can also write an image to the browser. SAImageGen's more advanced functionality includes writing text on images, cropping images, merging two images, and creating images with gradient background. Some image formats vary in size depending on image quality. The component allows you to modify both quality and size for such formats. Transparency and dithering can also be controlled
• SAImageCollection offers an in-memory-cached collection of images for high-speed access. It is intended to run at application scope, so it is thread safe (it supports the "Both" threading model) and supports concurrent read access to images in the collection. The component allows images to be shared across a web application, conserving precious server resources, and accessed very quickly, improving your users' experience. Images can be added to the cache from a file on disk or from an ADO Recordset