Image Resizing

[JanTro]

Howdy;
I have a series of visual basic screen captures that I need to resize and display on my website. When resizing, the quality degrades to the point that the text is unreadable. Since this is very important to display properly, does any one have any ideas on resizing screens? I can start in any format, but I usually start with a bitmap(PrtScn).

Thanks in advance

 

[tanderso]

In most cases, there's not much you can do to preserve text integrity when shrinking it. Each pixel is important, so when you remove some of them, sometimes the text becomes unreadable.

The most important thing to do is to make sure your resizing process resamples the image and anti-aliases the results. In other words, make sure your image software doesn't simply delete lines to shrink the image, but uses some sort of averaging calculation to emulate the appearance of full curves by staggering and combining shades of the color in such a way that it fools the eye into seeing a curve where none actually exists. For instance, Adobe Photoshop uses "Nearest Neighbor", "Bilinear", and "Bicubic" resampling algorithms. Doing this allows you to shrink it to some degree and still make it readable. But you can't go overboard with it... letters must have a minimal number of pixels.

Some fonts shrink better than other though. The less complex the font, the easier it shrinks. So Arial generally works better than Times. Change the font of your code before screen capture to see if it is more legible after shrinking. Experiment with a few fonts to see which work best.
Sincerely,

Tom Anderson
CEO, Order amid Chaos, Inc.

http://www.oac-design.com

 

[JanTro]

Thanks Tom,
As I have discovered, you are correct. I may try to programatically create the screens, but that is going to be a big job!

 

[foxdev]

JanTro, if it is appropriate, try cropping your small versions so that any unimportant border material is cropped out, allowing the remaining portion to be slightly larger.
Robert Bradley

http://www.foxdev.com/

http://www.agrainofhope.org

 

[tanderso]

You can use the "Print Screen" key on your keyboard to copy an image of your screen to your Windows clipboard. Then paste it into a new image in your favorite image editing software. That should be easier than using a VB method. If you cannot change the font in your editor, can you copy the code into wordpad? Or, if you need shots of your IDE and cannot change the font easily, then you can do a screen shot, shrink it down, but then show a small blown-up section to point out a particular part... you know, like when a large map wants to zoom in on a particular city.
Sincerely,

Tom Anderson
CEO, Order amid Chaos, Inc.

http://www.oac-design.com