Category Archives: DevLife

The stuff I encounter in my day-to-day life as a software developer

Android cropping image from camera or gallery

Recently I needed to implement avatar image upload from an Android app, I didn't found a library that did all that I needed so I forked a pretty good one and made it better, check it out: Android Image Cropper.
 
See also the followup post: Android Image Cropper async support and custom progress UI.
 

Requirements:

  • Pick image from camera or gallery using single chooser.
  • Select circular crop window in the image for the avatar.
  • Limit output avatar image to 500×500 pixels.
  • Efficient memory usage.

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HTML Renderer 1.5.0.0

A lot of things has changed in the past year and it seems more is going to change in the next, unfortunately those changes are not aligned with the work required for HTML Renderer. That's why it took so long for v1.5 release to finally be ready and the reason not all features I originally planned made it.
 
With a heavy heart I'm going to hold all significant work on HTML Renderer until either my career path brings me back to .NET, I have more free time to work on it or the project will get more attentions. In the meanwhile I will continue to support the library with small fixes and answering question on the discussions/issues pages.
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Setting HTML/Text to Clipboard revisited

After getting feedback that my original clipboard code doesn't handle all scenarios, especially with Chrome, I went back to the code to get a better understand of what's going on and find the correct way to set plain text and HTML snippet to clipboard.

 
Highlights

  • Setting plain text and html data.
  • Unicode support for plain text.
  • Clipboard HTML format
    • Version.
    • Parts start/end offsets.
    • StartFragment/EndFragment comments.
    • <html> and <body> elements.
    • Unicode handling.

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HTML syntax highlight using Rich-Text Format (RTF)

In case you want to display HTML with highlighted/colored syntax the simplest way to go is use WinForms RichTextBox, all is needed is to add RTF color tags surrounding HTML elements.
This helper class goal is exactly that, given a string containing HTML code it will return an RTF formatted string with the HTML elements colored.
 
I have used Alun Evans code as base, improving its coloring support and performance.
See it's usage in HtmlRenderer project.

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Generate image from HTML using HTML Renderer

The requirement to generate image from HTML snippet appears to be quite popular, as seen in a few StackOverflow questions1, so I have decided to properly support it in HTML Renderer to simplify the process and improve the results.
 
The support for image generation in HTML Renderer existed since day one, but it required manual handling of image graphics object, size limitations and configuration toggles.
Additionally the change to use GDI text rendering in 1.4.6.0 broke2 the most common code used for generating image with HTML Renderer, as provided in several blogs and StackOverflow answers3.

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Text rendering methods comparison or GDI vs. GDI+ revised

In this post, hopefully the last on this subject1, I'm going to compare the different text rending methods available for Windows .NET application for standard resolution devices2.
 
I decided to revise my original findings (see: The wonders of text rendering and GDI) and do a comprehensive comparison for three reasons:

  1. In response to my earlier post (see: GDI text rendering to image ) Kris commented he uses GraphicsPath for text rendering to image to achieve better visual quality than standard GDI+ text rendering.
  2. My latest "revelation" (see: Blurry/Fuzzy GDI+ Text Rendering using anti-alias and floating-point Y coördinates ) on improving GDI+ text rendering visual quality.
  3. GDI+ typographic StringFormat can offer good text measurement for custom text layout.

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Blurry/Fuzzy GDI+ Text Rendering using AntiAlias and floating-point Y coordinates

That's a long title that perfectly captures another issue I have found with GDI+ text rendering.
 
While checking Kris's claim on text rendering using GraphicsPath1 I have noticed that GDI+ text rendering using TextRenderingHint.AntiAlias looks much better (less fuzzy) in simple tests than the result of using HTML Renderer to generate transparent image (using AntiAlias hint). It's strange as HTML Renderer uses the same GDI+ text rendering method.

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