Libraries & objects
About Archicad and BIMcloud libraries, their management and migration, objects and other library parts, etc.

ISSUE: UI Dialogue User Interfase

Nader Belal
Mentor
Dear Graphisoft,

I would like to point at two thinks:
1. In ArchiCAD GDL manual, it does say anything about how it can become a problematic issue working with .PNG or .Tif files type directly on the user interface dialogue box (i.e.: transparency only works in any other case, & I don't know if that was also true for .SVG files)

2. I think you should work of this issue

Best regards,
Nader
A good friend of mine have once told me that I´m so brute that I´m capable of creating a GDL script capable of creating GDLs.
18 REPLIES 18
Nader Belal
Mentor
False Alarm,

There is an error in my photo-editing program that is generating my errors.

Sorry, my bad
A good friend of mine have once told me that I´m so brute that I´m capable of creating a GDL script capable of creating GDLs.
Nader Belal
Mentor
OK, issues:

1. In the manual you should mention that pics used in the dialogue box should be of 96 ppi, while those used in buttons is of 72 ppi.

2. I use Adobe products to generate the graphical contents (Photoshop, Illustrator, & Bridge), and it happens that if I generate pics with transparencies (either as .tif or .png) for the dialogue box, those images will not appear with the desired transparency, I believe that it have to do with the settings saving those pics from vector graphics.

Example of an ArchiCAD original pic with transparency in Adobe Bridge


Example of a pic with transparency in Adobe Bridge made by me

as you can observe ArchiCAD original graphics have a different way to represent transparencies.
A good friend of mine have once told me that I´m so brute that I´m capable of creating a GDL script capable of creating GDLs.
The tiff files are capable of having different pages, and that's why it's better to use them, because those pages are used by UI scaling mechanism.
When You analyze the original tiffs - they contain 100%, 150%, 200%, 300%.
The library tools can create such tiffs out of svg files, however... the manual is lacking the straightforward info how to do it...
If You are on the PC: make a bat file containng this:
"C:\Program Files\GRAPHISOFT\LibDev Toolkit 22 (3013)\Tool\WIN\LP_XMLConverter" convertlibrary -excludesvg %1 %1_tif
And than make it a right click option on the folder. You can use the Ultimate Windows Context Menu Customizer app, or modify registry manually
(sidnote correct the path of the lib devkit)

Having it done You can right click on the folder containing svg files, and after clicking on the above option, you will get another folder having the same name as the clicked one extended by "_tif".

Best Regards,
Piotr
Nader Belal
Mentor
The maximum reach that I had managed to reach related to those pics (don't take this as it is as I may had understood it badly😞

I have found out a thread in a graphical designers forum that commented my issues, and it happens that the transparencies in original ArchiCAD's tiff are defined as 0%, while Adobe Packages saves those transparent areas as NoData.

I will try your way.
A good friend of mine have once told me that I´m so brute that I´m capable of creating a GDL script capable of creating GDLs.
I never had issues with either tiff or png files created by Adobe software (although I used CS 6.0...now I switched to Affinity... as I do not like to be Adobe's CC = "cash cow" to milk)

The only problem with some transparency issues is when the file is scaled wrong - ie. until I have found an easy way to create those multipage tiffs I did overscaled pngs - but in some cases it caused a blurry lines unless the scaling was 100%

Piotr

BTW. Try avoiding use of svg's created out of bitmaps - the best results will be with pure vector content
Nader Belal
Mentor
I'm working with vectors (adjusted to their pixel module)

Can you give me an insight for the correct way to scale them ? Just in case that I'm doing it wrong?
A good friend of mine have once told me that I´m so brute that I´m capable of creating a GDL script capable of creating GDLs.
If You saved the vector file as svg with correct pixels dims(as100%)...and run the library tool... the tiff would be automatically created.

When I have to deal with the bitmap file created manually - I use export persona in Affinity Designer and create setup of exporting set of tiff files with transparency on 100%, 150%, 200% and 300%...

Then I use imagemagic to put them together...

Same MO:

I created a right click option to put together tiffs inside the folder - so I get the file with the name of this folder

the below line is put to bat file and this bat file is set as a right click command on folder.
"C:\Program Files\ImageMagick-7.0.8-Q16\magick.exe" convert %1\*.tiff %1.tiff

of course the image magic folder can change...

Piotr
Nader Belal
Mentor
Holy censored!

@Pitor Dobrowolski, you're right, about the multipage tiffs.

How the hell did Graphisoft forgot to tell it's users about that!!!!! NO why many users were banging their heads

And thanks alot.
A good friend of mine have once told me that I´m so brute that I´m capable of creating a GDL script capable of creating GDLs.
Nader Belal
Mentor
If anyone is interested, I have found a way to inspect multipage tiffs using Adobe Acrobat.

You can check it here: https://collab.its.virginia.edu/wiki/toolbox/Processing%20Multi-Image%20TIFFs.html
A good friend of mine have once told me that I´m so brute that I´m capable of creating a GDL script capable of creating GDLs.