ToolBookHelp.com Picture Objects

USING GRAPHICS
• Paint Objects
• Picture Objects
• Web Graphics Placeholder

PICTURE objects - all you ever wanted to know

There are various ways of getting a graphic image into ToolBook and using a Picture Object is just one of them. A Picture Object is essentially a Windows Metafile image. Okay, what the heck is a Windows Metafile image?

A Windows Metafile image is a image format which typically contains a Vector graphic - but could also contain a Raster image [a bitmap] - or both. It is quite a versatile format indeed.

What the heck is a Vector graphic? Well, typically everyone thinks of a graphic as a bitmap...an image composed of lots of pixels. However a Vector image is instead an image composed of Drawing Commands. For example there are many 3rd party image editing software packages such as Freehand, or Illustrator, or even Paint Shop Pro, which permit you to draw circles, arcs, curves, rectangles, polygon shapes, etc...all which are not simply pixels to manipulate but are instead objects that you can pick up, move, resize and modify the fill color and stroke color of.

The figure below shows a vector image in Paint Shop Pro. You can see that the image is controlled by a dialog which lets you set the visual properties.

You may be saying about now...."hey, that's kind of like the draw objects in ToolBook - you know the Lines, Ellipses, Rectangle objects which can be drawn, but then resized, moved, colored, etc"

And you would be correct. The Draw Objects in ToolBook are very much a Vector Image type of object. The real difference is that for Picture Objects, we are talking about a file you are importing which originated from some other program.

INSERTING A PICTURE OBJECT:
Using the Insert Menu, you can insert a graphic onto the current page or background. The graphic that you insert has to be a graphic that is stored on your computer as a file.

ToolBook has built in filters to recognize most available image file types, such a BMP, GIF, JPG, TIF, WMF, etc. Some image formats, such as BMP and DIB will come into ToolBook during this import process as a Paint Object, and others such as WMF, GIF, JPG and TIF will import as Picture Objects.

Note: If you have a 500k image that is stored in a tightly compressed 20k JPG file, when you import the image into ToolBook, the size of your TBK file will increase by the full 500k. ToolBook does not store imported images internally in their native format, but rather stores them as a fully decompressed bitmap.

PASTING IN A PICTURE OBJECT:
If you are using an image editing program such a Paint, PhotoShop or Paint Shop Pro you may also find it convenient to simply copy and paste your edited images directly from the image editing software.

To ensure your copied image is pasted into ToolBook as a Picture Object, use Paste Special from the Edit menu rather than simply using Paste. This way you can specifically choose to paste a Picture version of your clipboard image into ToolBook.

Note: By default, if you simply use Paste instead of Paste Special, ToolBook will default to pasting in a Picture Object rather than a Paint Object (bitmap) if it can find a Picture Object in the clipboard.

IDENTIFYING A PICTURE OBJECT:
Once you have a Picture Object on your page, you can tell for sure that it is in fact a Picture Object by right-clicking on the image. The right-click menu will reveal the type of object.

LIMITATIONS OF A PICTURE OBJECT:
You will quickly notice that you have no control over making the image Transparent from within ToolBook. Some Picture Objects contain transparent regions and others don't. This is controlled at the time the image is created - in the 3rd party image editing software package it was created with.

So, if it imports with Transparency on, there is no way to turn it off from inside of ToolBook. And if it imports with Transparency off, there is no way to turn in on from inside of Toolbook.

FEATURES OF A PICTURE OBJECT:
If you try to resize a Picture Object, you will find that it actually works, unlike a Paint Object which only Crops the image. In the figure below you can see the original image which was imported as well as a slightly smaller version and slightly larger version which I manually resized from within Toolbook. Notice the quality of the resized images is not optimal, but it works in a pinch.

If you need to resize your images, it is ALWAYS a better idea to edit your image in a professional image editing software package. Those specialized applications know how to manipulate your images in such a was as to provide the best overall results. ToolBook does a horrible job trying to stretch or shrink images...but then again it was never designed to be a professional image editing program. Notice the improved quality of the 3 images below when I use a professional image editing package (Paint Shop Pro) to resize the images rather than letting ToolBook resize them.

CONVERTING YOUR PICTURE OBJECT INTO A PAINT OBJECT:
ToolBook will permit you to convert a Picture Object to a Paint Object by using the Convert button in the Properties dialog.

Why would you want to do this? The best reason I can think of is so that you can set a Transparency value. Remember in the case of this bird I used for these examples, it was not created with the white color being transparent, and Picture Objects have no control over transparency - but if you could convert this to a Paint Object you could set the white region to be transparent.

A secondary reason to convert a Picture Object to a Paint Object is that Paint Objects draws faster in Native ToolBook. It takes longer for the graphic rendering engine inside of ToolBook to draw a Vector image than it does to simply draw a bitmap (Raster image) onto your screen. This is not an issue or concern for DHTML export however.

CONSIDERATIONS WHEN EXPORTING FOR DHTML:
When you export your ToolBook file to DHTML, Picture Objects will ALWAYS be converted to a GIF file. Why is this important to know? Because the quality of your images could be affected.

GIF images only hold a maximum of 256 colors. If your image was complex enough to need more than 256 colors this could result in color shade shifts or a dithering effect which makes your image appear grainy. If the quality is not acceptable for your Picture Object after exporting, try converting the Picture Object to a Paint Object, which has the ability to utilize the JPG format - allowing more colors to be used during the export of the object.
Since your Picture Object could contain transparency information built in, it is important for ToolBook to use the GIF format since only the GIF format can support the transparency effect. Unfortunately ToolBook can't tell if the Picture Object has this built in transparency feature, so it has to export ALL Picture Objects to GIF format just in case.