Hi

As Bertil has pointed out, Paradox 11 saves JPG files a bit strange. There
is supposed to be some options to alter the compression rate or file size. I
have tried this out myself, and as Bertil concluded, the JPG file does not
change with the options. In fact, the compression is so heavy that the
images are too much degraded. I have used outside Paradox s/w to manually
convert Paradox - table images (bmp) to JPG's.

Now, the question here is: Is there an addon to Paradox I can use to
programmatically read images from Paradox tables and save them as JPG's in a
way that I can decide the compression rate to keep the image quality?

Bjorn

I geuss the easy way would be to let Paradox read the tables and save the
images as .BMP files - hopefully that will not degrade quality. Then have
some tool convert the BMP to JPG, there should be plenty of tools do this.

Anders

On Fri, 9 Mar 2007 18:54:54 +0100, Bjorn Sagbakken wrote:

What Anders said; BMP is uncompressed and so does not degrade. The only
reason to store as JPEG would be to save disk space.

FWIW, most folk around here only store the path to the graphic file, and
use code to display the graphic in an undefined graphics object. This has
several advantages:
1. Graphics objects stored in tables are notoriously corruption-prone.
2. This saves all sorts of space.
3. You get to manage your graphics with graphics programs instead of a
database program with a few graphics commands.



Jim Hargan

"Anders Jonsson" <gt3TakeThisAway (AT) bredband (DOT) net> wrote

Yes, sure, but I want to integrate this tool programatically into Paradox. I
am already doing this manually with tools outside of Paradox. But I want to
skip this manual operation.

Bjorn

"Jim Hargan" <noJimspam (AT) omitThisHarganonline (DOT) com> wrote

There is also another reason to store as JPEG: The very same database is the
source to some web-pages, and in that aspect there is a concern for speed an
performance. With a high quality JPEG compression, there is very little
degrading of the images. My hope was there could be integrated a third-party
s/w for this into Paradox.

You may have some points in storing graphics outside the database, and only
storing the path. However, there are also some drawbacks doing this. Reports
in Paradox draw images directly from the tables in a very nice way. With the
files stored outside the database there will be a problem doing this. The
same goes for showing images in a table grid on a form, I do not know how
this can be obtained without the images beeing in a Paradox table.

Bjorn

The graphic field type in a Paradox table will never store a JPG - it will
be converted to BMP.

I think that if you use the binary field type you will be able to store the
jpg file, but then you have the same problem as you describe below.

I also only store the path to the file. For report purpose I load the images
into a temporary table. Performance might be an issue with a report with
many images but it has worked for me so far.

For forms I have never done it to a table frame but in a 1 x 1 MRO I use a
graphic object and use readfromfile which works OK.

Anders