Testing My Cropper Screen Capture Utility
Today has not been a great day. Back here I talked about trying to improve my workflow for getting screenshots onto my blog. I spent a bit of time with Cropper and particularly the ClipboardFormat plug-in which I've extended to do re-sizing and dropshadow.
It's perhaps not quite as good as my "old" process but I don't think it's too bad and it's now just Alt-PrtSc & paste into Live Writer. The image is automatically re-sized to specified dimensions (maintaining aspect ratio) and an optional dropshadow is applied. An example output is below (original image is 1000x750):
And here's the same image but using my "old" labour-intensive process:
And just for fun, here's the image pasted directly into Live Writer, resized to 640x480 and Border Drop Shadow applied:
I'm not so happy with the modified options UI that I hacked together (the bottom bit that looks hacked together is mine) :-)
However, the reason it's a bad day is that after all that, I became painfully aware that I didn't fully appreciate the difficulties of mixing transparent images and the clipboard. The top image looks okay because this blog happens to have a white background (and I've set the background of my resized image to white).
Originally I set the background of my resized image to transparent. This caused about an hour of consternation for me as the images, when copied to Paint.NET or any other app, appeared to be on a grey background. I thought my dropshadow code had gone wrong and I spent a long time stepping through it trying to figure out which dimension was getting messed up before I figured out it was nothing to do with the dropshadow but a side-effect of the clipboard.
So now I have something that partially works. In fact it works okay for me but only because I have a white background on my blog. I could spend more time trying to get it working "properly" or I could instead save the png file to disk and then use "Insert Picture" in Live Writer. That would work but it's not nearly as slick.
If anyone has any ideas or experience in getting this working, it'd be much appreciated!
Technorati Tags: cropper,screen capture,png,clipboard
Comments
Anonymous
June 19, 2008
PingBack from http://blog.a-foton.ru/2008/06/19/testing-my-cropper-screen-capture-utility/Anonymous
June 19, 2008
Personally I use ZapGrab for my blog, a program that lets you select which part of the screen you want to copy to clipboard (instead of the alt-prtscr that only copies your current active window). Then I just paste and scale it in live writer. Perhaps not the way where you have the most control, but it definently is easy and fast :).