- Making your bitmaps scaleable and stylized (part 1)
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Posted by oVan on Tuesday, April 24, 2007 | PermaLink | 0 comments
This is the first post in a two part article on how to make your bitmaps scaleable and stylized. In this first part, we'll have a look at a free utility by Peter Selinger called Potrace.
There are various reasons why you would want to make your bitmaps or icons scaleable: In older times, the main reason was to be able to print the images with high resolution. Nowadays, with the advent of high-resolution LCD screens and very large icons in Windows Vista and Mac OS X, it's becoming more and more obvious that just scaling your bitmaps leads to blocky, ugly edges. Other reasons might be to convert scanned company logos, handwritten text, etc.
Potrace is a utility that converts the original bitmap into a series of vectors. It is to some extent similar to CorelTrace and other tracing tools that are bundled with scanners and graphic programs. The advantages of Potrace are of course its price (free) and the fact that it's very lightweight (you don't need bloated installation files of hundreds of megabytes).
Original scanned image:
Potrace converter output:
You can find more examples of the excellent results you can achieve with Potrace on the Potrace examples page.
Once you've converted your bitmaps with Potrace, you can save the result in various formats: EPS, PostScript, PDF, SVG (scalable vector graphics), Xfig, Gimppath, and PGM. All of these formats allow you to print or display your image at any resolution without losing edge quality.
Bundled with Potrace is a tool called Mkbitmap. This is a little program to pre-process the input bitmap to achieve better results on grayscale and color images. You can see examples and an explanation of Mkbitmap on the Mkbitmap examples page.
In the second part of this article, we'll have a look at scanning a drawing, converting it with Potrace to the SVG format, and then stylizing it with the excellent Inkscape SVG editor.
Download: Potrace and Mkbitmap (Windows, Mac OS X, Linux)
Part two will be published soon. Meanwhile, comments and recommendations welcome!
Update: Corrected the link to the Potrace Samples!Labels: bitmap, convert, download, EPS, free, Inkscape, output, PDF, Potrace, scaleable, SourceForge, SVG
- Office 2007 RTM: Installation Problems
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Posted by oVan on Monday, November 13, 2006 | PermaLink | 0 commentsMicrosoft Office 2007 Professional has been released to manufacturing (RTM), and is available for MSDN and TechNet subscribers as of today.
When installing Office 2007, you may encounter the following problem:
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Setup Errors
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Setup is unable to proceed due to the following error(s):
The 2007 Microsoft Office system does not support upgrading from a prerelease version of the 2007 Microsoft Office system. You must first uninstall any prerelease versions of the 2007 Microsoft Office system products and associated technologies.
Correct the issue(s) listed above and re-run setup.
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OK
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According to the Installation Read Me page (the cd doesn't contain up to date information, only a link to this page at the Office website), this may be caused by the Office 2003 Web Components. Here's the explanation:
The Office 2003 Web Components feature installed with Office 2007 Beta2 causes the Office 2007 product to block its installation. Users should use Add Remove Programs in the Windows Control Panel to Remove the Office 2003 Web Components, and then install the final Office 2007 product.
However, after uninstalling this product, you can still get the same error message. Googling further on the Microsoft website, I came across the following list on this page of programs that you should remove also:- 2007 Microsoft Office Add-in: Microsoft Save as PDF or XPS (Beta)
- 2007 Microsoft Office Add-in: Microsoft Save as PDF (Beta)
- 2007 Microsoft Office Add-in: Microsoft Save as XPS (Beta)
- Microsoft Expression Web Designer Beta 1
- Microsoft Expression Web Designer CTP1
- Microsoft Office Compatibility Pack for Word, Excel, and PowerPoint 2007 File Formats (Beta 2 Technical Refresh)
The above list is not mentioned on the ReadMe page, so I doubt a lot of users will find this information. Hey, maybe we should just remove all programs? :-)
APPLIES TO- Microsoft Office Professional Plus 2007
- Microsoft Office Enterprise 2007
- Microsoft Office Ultimate 2007
- Microsoft Office Professional 2007
- Microsoft Office Standard 2007
- Microsoft Office Home and Student 2007
- Microsoft Office Basic 2007
- Microsoft Office Groove 2007
- Microsoft Office Access 2007
- Microsoft Office Excel 2007
- Microsoft Office OneNote 2007
- Microsoft Office Outlook 2007
- Microsoft Office PowerPoint 2007
- Microsoft Office Publisher 2007
- Microsoft Office Word 2007
- Microsoft Office InfoPath 2007
- Microsoft Office Project Professional 2007
- Microsoft Office Project Standard 2007
- Microsoft Office Visio Professional 2007
- Microsoft Office Visio Standard 2007
Keywords: kbuninstall kbsetup kbexpertisebeginner kbtshoot kbprb KB927222Labels: 2003, 2007, B2TR, beta, Expression, install, KB, Microsoft, MSDN, Office, PDF, Professional, RTM, System, TechNet, Technical Refresh, web components, Web Designer, XPS