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Feature Overview

darrinm edited this page Dec 21, 2012 · 1 revision

Overview of Piceditor features

This document outlines the core editing features and some of the steps that may be necessary to get them working.

Piceditor supports the following core editing features:

  1. Effects
  2. Document Objects
  3. Collage
  4. Fancy Collage

Effects

These are photo effects, basic edits, etc. These should work out of the box. Some effects may have incomplete algorithms. These are left as an exercise for the reader.

Document Objects

There are various interactive elements users can add to their photo. These include:

  • Text
  • Stickers/Shapes
  • Textures
  • Layering (other photos)
  • Object Frames (e.g. daisies)

Text

Text includes a basic "global" font which uses a system font. To support additional fonts:

  1. Get appropriate licenses
  2. Compile the font into a SWF
  3. Make it available in fonts.xml

Stickers/Shapes

These are clip-art like objects you can add to your photo. They include:

  • Geometric shapes (should work out of the box)
  • Run-time loaded SWFs

To create new run-time loaded SWFs:

  1. Create the SWF
  2. Create thumbnail previews for the SWF and place in appropriate places
  3. Add your SWF to shapes.xml
  4. Run buildXML.py - this may need to be tweaked to get it working. In theory, it should parse Shapes.xml and create the following:
  • thumbnail bundles (a single PNG with many thumbnails tiled)
  • Per-group XML documents, localized (as appropriate)

Textures

These are a special version of shapes that overlay the entire document. You will need to source your textures and reference them correctly.

Layering

Users can import their own images as objects using the piceditor basket. Current versions of this require server side support but this might be accomplished by writing a custom "bridge" which does one or both of:

Reads a list of images off of a server Allows users to upload multiple images to the client without server support Object Frames These are frames created using a set of stickers and metadata to describe the distribution.

Collage

Users can create a collage of images. Similar to layering, support for uploading multiple images will need to be added. This can be done with back end photo service/api or a way to temporarily upload multiple images into the client.

Collages are limited to a grid of photos with a solid background.

Fancy Collage

Users can create a collage using a template.

The template itself is a piceditor document with special "target" document objects representing the places users can insert their photos.