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Contents 1 Welcome to the Graphics village pump ! 2 Talking, Acting 3 November_2009 4 Converting images to two colors black and white 5 Image extraction from book scan data 6 Animated GIF resizing. Last.fm resizes them. Why not MediaWiki? 7 Which of these SVGs is better? 8 Signatures to SVG? 9 File:Creative_Commons_Semaforoa.svg 10 File:Pump Jack labelled resized.svg

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[edit] November_2009

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[edit] Converting images to two colors black and white

Sorry, for beginner question, but my graphics skills doesn't go too far from cropping :-)

I made photocopy of public domain book (example), 631 pages. I need to convert gray scale image to two color black and white PNGs. My goal is to preserve sharpness of the text, but also make embedded images as good as possible.

Original images are in RAW format.

Please give me step-by-step instructions. I have Adobe Photoshop Elements which may be useful.

EugeneZelenko (talk) 15:29, 29 September 2009 (UTC)

[edit] Image extraction from book scan data

[I hope this is the right forum, move the post if it is not]

I often need to extract details from scanned books, but I uncertain of the optimum method for doing so. Restoration is not the problem, in fact that is not appropriate for the intended purpose. I understand that PNG is considered to be desirable, so I have previously converted files to that format. I have had moderate success with cropping details from jp2 files, found at sites like archive.org, but these are not always available. The widely used djvu format is not appropriate for this purpose, the strength of that format is in handling and compressing the text of book scans. The current example is File:Blake by Linnell (as Story's frontispiece).png (from a TIFF) and File:Blake by Linnell (as Story's frontispiece) 2.png (PDF). I would like to document the 'best practice' and a simple workflow, for the benefit of other contributors, so any help would be greatly appreciated. cygnis insignis 10:34, 12 October 2009 (UTC)

[edit] Animated GIF resizing. Last.fm resizes them. Why not MediaWiki?

Has there been any progress with this? Why can't MediaWiki correctly resize animated gif images?

Here is a last.fm animated gif linked below. I found it today. Note that correctly resized animated images are showing up on last.fm pages:

• http://userserve-ak.last.fm/serve/126/36538753.gif
• http://www.last.fm/user/Inci90 - largest size. 55 kilobytes.
• http://www.last.fm/user/Inci90/library - smallest size. 8 kilobytes.
• http://www.last.fm/music/Cluster/+shoutbox - medium size. 20 kilobytes. The Inci90 avatar is currently next to the third comment.

There are many animated GIF images on the Commons. For example;

• Category:Animations of geometry

Note that the full kilobytes used for the full-size image is downloaded for the thumbs. It causes some categories to take a long time to load due to all the full-size GIF animations having to load. I have broadband, and so they usually eventually finish loading. It can take a long time even on broadband. It must be an extra load on the servers.

A full category of animated thumbnail images will not finish loading for most dialup users unless they wait a very long time. It deprives them of looking at the thumbnails to decide if they want to use any of the animated images. It deprives them of static images too if they happen to be in a category page with many animated images. --Timeshifter (talk) 02:58, 20 October 2009 (UTC)

It just hasn't been a priority for developers, since a workaround exists (offline resizing). Dcoetzee (talk) 06:01, 20 October 2009 (UTC)

Offline resizing does not solve the thumbnail problem. Look at Category:Animations of geometry. All the images in that category are animated images. All the animated-GIF thumbnails are created by downloading the full-size animated-GIF images, and then resizing them in the browser. This is a huge download, and a huge waste of server time and bandwidth. It wastes money too. It also makes the animated images inaccessible to many dialup users. It also makes some static images inaccessible too if there are static images mixed up with a lot of animated images in a category. --Timeshifter (talk) 15:53, 20 October 2009 (UTC)

Bugzilla's bug #16451 GIF scaling limit should be applied to animated GIFs only is marked as fixed as of 2009-08-14. --Jarekt (talk) 21:03, 22 October 2009 (UTC)

Thanks for the link. This is great news. Maybe it will go live in the next version of MediaWiki that is installed here. --Timeshifter (talk) 02:18, 23 October 2009 (UTC)

Latest reply on the bug thread says this: "Yes, for ordinary GIFs to render properly somebody needs to activate it on Wikimedia."

--Timeshifter (talk) 10:19, 5 November 2009 (UTC)

I left a request for implementation at COM:AN here:

Commons:Administrators' noticeboard#Animated GIF resizing bug. Fix awaits implementation by admin

--Timeshifter (talk) 16:45, 12 November 2009 (UTC)

[edit] Which of these SVGs is better?

I tried my hand at editing the SVG code of File:Plus-,minus-,and equality-sign.svg to make it SVG valid and to reduce the file size, and I think that I succeeded. The file size was reduced from 26 to 4 KB—fairly significant, I think—and it now validates at the W3C validator. I was wondering if somebody more well-versed in SVG than myself could look at the code and let me know if it is an actual improvement or not... as part of reworking it, I removed various namespaces and the metadata which don't actually add anything to the visual appearance of the image. See Media:Plus-,minus-,and equality-sign.svg (original) and Media:Test.svg (my version; will likely be overwritten at some point with a completely different image). Any advice on if I shouldn't have removed/modified something would be much appreciated. If it all looks good, is it worth doing this to more SVGs to reduce the file size and make them validate correctly, or is it not really significant? Thanks! Drilnoth (talk) 18:52, 30 October 2009 (UTC)

Did you do anything in addition to removing Inkscape/Sodipodi specific parts? If not, your work may have been educational, but it can be achieved fairly automatical. The file originates from Inkscape, where you have the choice to save it in two formating variants: "Inkscape SVG" has programm-specific elements as in the original, "Plain SVG" produces output just as your edit. So, you don't have to do it by hand.

Please note that there is no advantage to re-uploading files in the "plain" variant. Renderers (either server-side for the preview images you see on File pages or browsers when looking at them directly) will just ignore elements that do not belong to svg or other officialy supported namespaces (xml and xlink, mainly).

File size is equally immaterial, since in 99% of all cases user will only download the PNG previews and not the originals. Processing times for the production of these previews is also not really dependent on size, but on the complexity of the necessary computations. Some filters for example might only have three or four lines in the file, but take up to ten seconds to compute even on modern processors. --Hk kng (talk) 19:40, 30 October 2009 (UTC)

I agree. But simple diagrams like these can be coded by hand, see Category:Manually coded SVG for examples. The main advantage is that it is easier to modify such figures. /Pieter Kuiper (talk) 19:57, 30 October 2009 (UTC)

(@ Hk kng): I basically removed extra whitespace, the inkscape and sodipodi namespaces, and the metadata, and did some reorganization for readability. I thought that reducing the file size would make it load faster... wouldn't the PNG take less time to build, at least?

Anyway, it seems I had made a typo or something... the validator is now saying that my version also fails. :/ Anyway, thanks for your time! Drilnoth (talk) 22:14, 30 October 2009 (UTC)

[edit] Signatures to SVG?

Would someone like to turn these signatures of famous politicians into SVGs?--Blargh29 (talk) 06:45, 5 November 2009 (UTC)

	Done		Done
	Done

I'll take this. Connormah (talk) 19:39, 21 November 2009 (UTC)  Done Connormah (talk) 19:56, 21 November 2009 (UTC)

• • Beautiful! You're my favorite person ever!--Blargh29 (talk) 07:04, 22 November 2009 (UTC)

[edit] File:Creative_Commons_Semaforoa.svg

Hi. I can't see this file I uploaded. Can someone tell me which is the problem? Thank's.--Unai Fdz. de Betoño (talk) 15:39, 18 November 2009 (UTC)

You are using external file in your svg - cc by-nc-sa.png, make it embedded or remove --Justass (talk) 15:45, 18 November 2009 (UTC)

Thank you! :-) --Unai Fdz. de Betoño (talk) 08:49, 19 November 2009 (UTC)

[edit] File:Pump Jack labelled resized.svg

File:Pump Jack labelled resized.svg has some font issues. Anybody know how to fix them? --Jarekt (talk) 04:31, 20 November 2009 (UTC)

It was using flowed text, seems ok now --Justass (talk) 13:21, 20 November 2009 (UTC)