1610 posts
Posted 11 July 2014 - 06:43 PM
nfp2png (Beta!)
I was getting tired of the long, tedious process of embedding a screenshot of a program on the forums. That's why I started this three part project - nfp2png. The end goal is to have something that will allow you to, at any time while running a program on a computer, press a key-combo (Like ctrl + p, ctrl + u, etc) and have it take a screenshot (as a Sketch file most likely) which will be uploaded to Pastebin automatically. At this point a dialog will appear on the screen with the paste's ID, which can then be typed into a web page and instantly converted into a complete image tag, ready for pasting into a thread.
The parts
As I mentioned in the above blob, this project is broken up into three parts:
- The backend - this is the PHP code that converts the file to a PNG image so it can be embedded. This part is already done and working for NFP pastes.
- The frontend - this is the page that the client can use to provide a paste ID and have it automatically converted, with a preview, embed code, and possibly other tools.
- The screenshot utility - this will most likely be the most difficult part to create, as it would require everything from a custom terminal API to advanced coroutine control. This would be available for install on a CC computer, which would then be able to save the data from the screen as a Sketch file (I'm working on adding support for Sketch files to the backend) so that it can be converted to a PNG when necessary.
How it works
Right now, the only part that can be tested is the PHP backend. It can currently convert any nfp (paint) file into a PNG which can then be embedded:
To demonstrate, here's some random scribbles:
And here's the link that I embedded it with:
As you can see, this uses the GET protocol to specify the parser version (This will be critical for backwards-compatibility) and the paste ID of the file. The PNG is generated "on-the-fly" by the script (not saved) to preserve disk space. For anyone who looks carefully, you'll notice that I'm passing these parameters to a file called "convert.png." This is a redirect, not a real file, to the "convert.php" file. This is critical, because the forums do not allow you to embed images if the extension isn't an image extension - no matter what the MIME type is. Without this, an error will be shown when posting and the image tag would be converted to a link.
As the frontend is not complete yet, the only way to use this is manually typing out the parameters - but here's a template:
http://apemanzilla.me/nfp2png/convert.png?parserversion=1&pasteid=[replace me]&debug=falseJust replace the part that says to replace it (Including the [ and ]) with the ID of a paste with an NFP. If you really feel like it, you can also change the debug flag to "true" - this just numbers each pixel by column.
How to help/Code
I am a strong believer in open-source software. All three parts of this project are/will be available on GitHub here for anyone to see/contribute to.
More examples
One of the original testing images
All 16 colors
Another testing image, with debug mode enabled. Each number represents the column of the pixel.
License
All of the code is licensed under the MIT Open-Source License.
Edited on 12 July 2014 - 04:51 PM
