I need an animation in my program. My designer draws animation in Flash and provides me with *.fla file. All I need is to grab 30-40 PNGs from this file and store them within my internal storage.
Is it possible grab resources from *.fla with C++ ? Probably, some Adobe OLE objects can help?
Please, advice.
Thanks in advance.
If I asked an artist to make me an icon I wouldn't expect to need to write code to convert a .3DS model into a usable icon format.
You can save yourself a lot of time and hassle by having your designer use File->Export and give you PNGs of the layers and frames instead of a .FLA file if that's the format you require for your implementation.
If that's not possible for some reason then you can probably find a flash decompiler that has a command line option which you could launch from your program to extract assets as part of your loading sequence but that is generally frowned upon because this is not the intended use of the proprietary format for .swf/.fla anymore than you should design applications to extract source code from a binary executable.
Assuming
You are using CS5
The assets used internally in the FLA are already PNG's as you want them to be.
Then simply get the FLA saved as a XFL file, and you will be able to grab them from the library folder ( but then why not just get them to mail you the pngs ? )
So if for some reason you can only get access to the fla and not the designer, then you can do it programatically by renaming the fla to .zip, extracting.. and you have the XFL format.
Related
I know how to create and code my own setup program but i need to be redirected at some point. This point i'm sure inlight other people too.
I created a setup project. All is done. Except, installation files inside of EXE.
I know 2 different ways of doing this:
Create resource in EXE and embed RAR/ZIP file.
Put compressed archive with files along with EXE. EXE will read contents and data from this protected and compressed ZIP.
But what i want is number 1. I want to embed it. But;
What is the proper way of embedding this? Are other setup creators do the same thing? Embed resource as compressed single zip in EXE? Or do they another trick?
How do you extract files? On the fly by memory? Like read each file one-by-one. Synced. Or first, copy ZIP to temp and extract from it.
Or even embed all files separately to the resources.
I, even think that if i should create simple MSI without dialogs and embed it and run from background but i want to take all control. I want everything belongs to the original setup that i created.
Note:
I want to make my own dialogs, effects, procedures, functions and
steps. Yes, MSI is acceptable but i will stick with its features. Oh,
If im able to extend it, why should i spent more time doing this
instead of making my own? I am so confused... I am talking about very big setup project here. Not just a standard ugly UI with less features. At least, im gonna try :)
Do not give me any sample/code just show me a correct path, please.
Best options here:
Create ZIP compatible EXE that reads itself as ZIP and read the file list and extract.
Create non-zip compatible EXE that has a hidden body somewhere and read that area (seek) and get the list & extract.
The proper way to do it is to use the Windows installer technology, aka MSI. There is a nice, Microsoft blessed toolset called WiX that you can use to greatly simplify the process.
http://wix.codeplex.com/
If you are truly intent on reinventing the wheel, you can look through the source code to WiX on how things are done.
Best options here:
Create ZIP compatible EXE that reads itself as ZIP and read the file list and extract.
Create non-zip compatible EXE that has a hidden body somewhere and read that area (seek) and get the list & extract.
Why write your own? Much easier to use WiX (http://wixtoolset.org/) with optionally a graphical interface like WiXEdit (http://wixedit.sourceforge.net/). Have you thought about additional requirements like uninstall etc...
Good luck!
Would InnoSetup help with your problem? You can personalise the dialogs and extend its functionality quite a lot.
As part of my application, my client has requested that I include an automated e-mailing system. As part of this system, I generate HTML code and use automation to send it via. Outlook.
However, they also require a PDF copy of the HTML document to be sent as an attachment. My initial attempts involved using libHaru, which proved difficult to use efficiently, as I was required to create the PDF document from scratch, which required computation of the position of each of the lines in a table, and positioning of all the text, etc.
I was wondering if there would be a way to programmatically convert HTML code (or an HTML file if need be) into a PDF document either by using Win32/MFC itself or an external library.
Thanks in advance!
EDIT: Just to clarify, I am looking for solutions which minimize external dependencies.
You should evaluate this utility wkhtmltopdf:
http://code.google.com/p/wkhtmltopdf/
You can call it from the command line without the need to run a setup.
I use it generating my output documents as html then cal a ShellExecute(...) to convert it to PDF. It's great!
Inside uses webkit + qt. So compability with modern HTML is OK.
Hope it helps.
I'd take a look at PDF Creator, which can be used as a COM object (that acts pretty much like a printer). I haven't used it to print HTML, so I'm not sure, but my guess is that you'll probably end up having to instantiate a web browser control to render the HTML, and then feed it from there to the PDF control.
Some possible answers are in this thread:
C++ Library to Convert HTML to PDF?
Not sure if they will satisfy your particular requirements, but these might at least get you started.
Edit:
Some other possible options here.
Not MFC but you can try QtWebKit. It can render and export HTML to PDF, PNG, JPEG
is it possible to do changes to image's matrix without using any library in c++? to load and display image as well?
Sure. Grab a copy of the specification for whatever image format you're interested and write the read/write functions yourself.
Note that to write display functionality without an external library you'll likely need to run your code in kernel mode to get to the frame buffer memory, but that can certainly be done.
Not that you'd necessarily want to do it that way...
Like any typical file, an image file is simply made up of bytes; there is nothing special about an image file.
In my opinion, the most difficult part of reading/writing image files without the use of a library is understanding the file format. Once you understand the format, all you need to do is define appropriate data structures and read the image data into them (for more advanced formats you may have to do some extra work e.g. decompression).
The simplest image format to work with would have to be PPM. It's a pretty bad format but it's nice and easy to read in and write back to a file.
http://netpbm.sourceforge.net/doc/ppm.html
Apart from that, bitmaps are also pretty simple to work with. Like Drew said, just download a copy of the specification and work from there.
As for displaying images, I think you're best off using a library or framework unless you want to see how it's done for the sake of learning.
Greetings all,
I am currently a rising Sophomore (CS major), and this summer, I'm trying to teach myself C++ (my school codes mainly in Java).
I have read many guides on C++ and gotten to the part with ofstream, saving and editing .txt files.
Now, I am interested in simply importing an image (jpeg, bitmap, not really important) and renaming the aforementioned image.
I have googled, asked around but to no avail.
Is this process possible without the download of external libraries (I dled CImg)?
Any hints or tips on how to expedite my goal would be much appreciated
Renaming an image is typically about the same as renaming any other file.
If you want to do more than that, you can also change the data in the Title field of the IPTC metadata. This does not require JPEG decoding, or anything like that -- you need to know the file format well enough to be able to find the IPTC metadata, and study the IPTC format well enough to find the Title field, but that's about all. Exactly how you'll get to the IPTC metadata will vary -- navigating a TIFF (for one example) takes a fair amount of code all by itself.
When you say "renaming the aforementioned image," do you mean changing metadata in the image file, or just changing the file name? If you are referring to metadata, then you need to either understand the file format or use a library that understands the file format. It's going to be different for each type of image file. If you basically just want to copy a file, you can either stream the contents from one file stream to another, or use a file system API.
std::ifstream infs("input.txt", std::ios::binary);
std::ofstream outfs("output.txt", std::ios::binary);
outfs << insfs.rdbuf();
An example of a file system API is CopyFile on Win32.
It's possible without libraries - you just need the image specs and 'C', the question is why?
Targa or bmp are probably the easiest, it's just a header and the image data as a binary block of values.
Gif, jpeg and png are more complex - the data is compressed
I'm looking for a way to embed an image in a library (Windows-only). I don't want to go the 'traditional' way of putting it in the resources (because of special circumstances that make it not so convenient to mess around with the resource handle.
Ideally, there would be something like xpm files: a 'text' representation of an image that is put in a c array and that some code converts into a bitmap in memory, which can then somehow be loaded into an HIMAGE or an HICON. The images I want to embed are 32-bit bitmaps (bmp). Any ideas? I'm using MFC so an MFC library would be fine, but of course I can use a library that doesn't use MFC too. Thanks.
Google for a bin2c utility (something like http://stud3.tuwien.ac.at/~e0025274/bin2c/bin2c.c). It takes a file's binary representation and spits out a C source file that includes an array of bytes initialized to that data.
Just link the file in and you have your image sitting in a chunk of memory.
Using this kind of tool is really common on embedded systems where such things as 'resources' and even files might not exist.
The Gimp can export to C files. I think that would be the easiest way to do it.
The open source application Hexy is designed specifically for this. It runs on windows and linux. https://github.com/tristan2468/Hexy