SoftArtisans ImgWriter Guide

What is SoftArtisans ImgWriter?

SoftArtisans ImgWriter provides fast, full-featured image creation, editing, and caching.

SoftArtisans ImgWriter includes two server-side COM components - SAImageGen and SAImageCollection - which offer sophisticated image processing and creation, as well as image management and caching.

SAImageGen

SAImageGen can generate new images or manipulate existing images. SAImageGen supports 9 common image formats: bmp, gif, wmf, jpg, emf, png, psd, pcx, and tiff (see note). It can read files from and save files to disk, database, or memory. SAImageGen can also write an image to the browser.

SAImageGen allows you to:

Construct charts, labels, and banners
Resize an image
Crop an image
Create a thumbnail from a larger image
Add a watermark to an image
Display text on an image
Merge images
Create an image with a gradient background
Turn photo negatives into color positives
Control transparency and dithering

SAImageCollection

SAImageCollection offers an in-memory cached collection of images for high speed access. It is intended to run at application scope, so it is thread safe (it supports the "Both" threading model) and supports concurrent read access to images in the collection. The component allows images to be shared across a web application, conserving precious server resources. Images in the collection can be accessed very quickly, improving the user's experience. Images can be added to the cache from a file on disk or from an ADO Recordset.

Note: ImgWriter supports TIFF images but will not read a TIFF image with LZW compression.