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Posted by Terry Pinnell on 03/10/06 18:21
Jim Higson <jh@333.org> wrote:
>Terry Pinnell wrote:
>
>> Jim Higson <jh@333.org> wrote:
>>
>>>In general, the command line is good because it lets you do things the
>>>original program creators didn't think of. For example, I recently had to
>>>produce raster images containing the first few hundread square numbers. I
>>>don't think this could have easily been done with GUI software.
>>
>> Thanks.
>>
>> I'm curious about that interesting last point. You mean you had to
>> produce N images, each just containing a single number 1, 4, 9... etc?
>> Of a certain size and font/background colour?
>>
>> If so, I suppose I'd have fired up IrfanView and played with my
>> keystroke-entering macro program, Stiletto (now obsolete), to automate
>> a series of operations like:
>> - Open new file
>> - Draw a text rectangle
>> - Copy text from a pre-established Excel column, selecting next row
>> each time
>> - Pasted it into IV's text box (using pre-established font size and
>> colour, etc)
>> - Saved file
>
>Ok, I suppose this would be *possible* in a GUI, but it is much simpler as
>scripting once you are familiar with it because you have direct access to
>loops, maths etc.
>
>Also, GUI-imitating macros can fail if the layout of Excel or whatever
>changes in future.
>
>Maybe you are familiar with a scripting language such as PHP? I mention PHP
>because it is often used to make HTML so it is likely you are familiar with
>it, this being alt.html and all, but there are many other languages that
>could be used for this task.
>
>The PHP-ish psudo-code is something like:
>
>for( $i = 0 to 200 )
>{ $square = $i*$i;
> `convert base_image.png --write $square numberedimage-$i.png`;
>}
>
>
>Another interesting possiblity is generating images on a web server as
>requested, in the same way that many servers only generate HTML as it is
>asked for. You can do some funky stuff this way.
Thanks for the follow-up Jim. Unfortunately I haven't learned any
scripting language. Would like to though, as I see it mentioned so
often.
--
Terry, West Sussex, UK
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