It's been a while since I took a look at Atlantis - congratulations, it's looking very nice these days. I'm still awaiting tables, though, before switching (hint hint!) - tables would make it a slam dunk.
In testing the latest release, I found what appears to be quite a major bug in Atlantis' handling of JPG images (and possibly other formats), which appears to be related to the way in which Atlantis interacts with the Windows clipboard.
I've tested this quite extensively with JPG images, but no other format.
In short, although the insertion of JPG images works as advertised (RTF files containing only images are just over twice the size of the images, which makes sense), if the image is subsequently cut from the document (ie. cut and copied to the Windows clipboard) and then pasted back, it either:
1. becomes blank (the outline "box" is there but no image), or
2. the image reappears, but the document's file size increases greatly
Note that both the Cut and Paste operations take quite a long time with images, indicative that something else is going on. I've yet to work out exactly what triggers either condition though.
I primarily tested this behaviour with RTF files, in order to be able to see what was going on by loading the document into a text editor, given that RTFs are essentially marked-up TXT files. The problem is that even though the image that's initially embedded into the document is a JPG, the operation of cutting and pasting converts it to PNG, which - certainly for photos - tends to give vastly bigger file sizes than for the corresponding JPGs.
If you need more detailed feedback on this (there appear to be other image-related bugs, too, although I'm not sure whether they're caused by Atlantis, or by OpenOffice.org which I'm using to test cross-application compatibility), just say so and I'll be happy to email you.
Thanks
Image handling bug
The Copy command places images onto the clipboard in the so called "Windows metafile" format. This is required because most word processing applications do not support JPEGs within the clipboard's RTF data. When you paste such a clip back to an Atlantis document, Atlantis converts all the metafiles to PNG if the "Tools | Options... > Load / Save > Save supercompact RTF documents" option is on. Otherwise the "Windows metafile" format is kept. Normally converting JPEG to PNG and especially to a metafile leads to a much bigger graphic file. This is why you get a bigger document file.
Placing images onto the clipboard as metafiles is a must. But any next build/release of Atlantis will also place original JPEG images (if any) onto the clipboard. Consequently copying/pasting images within Atlantis will not change the original format of images.
Placing images onto the clipboard as metafiles is a must. But any next build/release of Atlantis will also place original JPEG images (if any) onto the clipboard. Consequently copying/pasting images within Atlantis will not change the original format of images.
Last edited by admin on Sat Aug 16, 2008 9:32 pm, edited 1 time in total.
