How I capture the map from the UI-View screen and process it

Basic Screen Capture

1. Graphics Format and Color Depth Setup

• go to the UI-View32 main screen
• open File|Capture Map
• press F1 to read the Help
• select PNG format and 256 colors
• do not check 'Capture the screen'
• close Capture Map with 'OK'

2. UI-Captioner Setup

• go to the UI-View32 main screen
• open File|UI-Captioner Setup
• press F1 to read the Help
• set up the time stamp type you want
• close UI-Captioner Setup with 'OK'

3. Scheduler Setup

• go to the UI-View32 main screen
• open File|Schedule Editor
• press F1 to read the Help
• edit the schedule
• • you need to input one line for the screen capture
  • you need a second line to run uicaptioner.exe for the time stamp after the map is captured
  • in both cases you have to input the full path name and image name:
                                                           "c:\....\ui-view32\UI-WebServer\html\images\image_name.png"
  • the default path for \....\ is \program files\peak systems\
• close Schedule Editor with 'OK'

An alternative way to edit the schedule is to edit the file SCHEDULE.TXT in the UI-View32 directory with NOTEPAD (not WORD!). This way is easier for long paths and many items in the scheduler list.

The file could look like this:

   E2 CAPTURE_MAP "c:\....\ui-view32\UI-WebServer\html\images\image_name.png"
   E2 RUN UICAPTIONER.EXE "c:\....\ui-view32\UI-WebServer\html\images\image_name.png"

The default path for \....\ is \program files\peak systems\.

Processing with IrfanView

IrfanView allows to process images in the background with command line parameters. In the help function of IrfanView you find the complete list of all available commands.
For the small image on the front page of my UI-WebServer I used three functions in order to reduce file and image size:

• /crop=(x,y,w,h) : crops input image, x-start, y-start, width, height. I used this function to show only the center of the full captured screen image
• /convert=map_name.image_type : I used this function to convert the PNG input file into a JPG file, which is considerably smaller than a PNG in my case.
•  /jpgq=X defines the JPG quality, with X between 0 and 100

In order to do the above processing, I added a line to SCHEDULE.TXT which looks like this:

E2 RUN "c:\program files\irfanview\i_view32.exe" "c:\....\ui-view32\UI-WebServer\html\images\map.png" /crop=(270,250,550,350) /jpgq=75 /convert=map2.jpg  (this is all on one single line in SCHEDULE.TXT!)

The above assumes that IrfanView is in the default directory. If it is not, the path has to be modified accordingly. If you want to time stamp the small map image, you do it the way described under (3) with UICAPTIONER. The default path for \....\ is \program files\peak systems\.

Separate generation of a time stamp icon

After having implemented all the above, I noticed that the image files sizes always doubled with the time stamping by UICAPTIONER. The color depth of the images after time stamping was always 24 bit per pixel. Therefore I decided to create a separate time stamp icon to be "glued" underneath the displayed image, either the small JPG at my front page or the full screen capture PNG.

For this purpose I created a dummy PNG with IrfanView which has 155*20 pixels. I called it stamp.png and it is time stamped with UICAPTIONER immediately after generation of the screen capture PNG. In the UI-Captioner Setup I've choosen the font Arial size 10.

This results in the following three lines in SCHEDULE.TXT:

E2 CAPTURE_MAP "C:\....\ui-view32\UI-WebServer\html\images\map.png"
E2 RUN UICAPTIONER.EXE "c:\....\ui-view32\UI-WebServer\html\images\stamp.png"
E2 RUN "C:\program files\irfanview\i_view32.exe" "C:\....\ui-view32\UI-WebServer\html\images\map.png" /crop=(270,250,550,350) /jpgq=75 /convert=map2.jpg

The default path for \....\ is \program files\peak systems\.

This is the final version which produces the two images and the time stamp icon you can see on my UI-WebServer.

If you want to edit the Webserver with one of the standard HTML editors, you probably have to copy the files from the Special Pages folder to the HTML folder at first and to move them back after editing.

If you have comments or questions, please drop me a line.

73 de Gerhard, F5VAG / DL7MW