Draw styled lines in WPF - c#

Is there any way to make lines between points, given a simple geometry as line style, using WPF geometries? I know it is possible to make these kind of lines:
-- -- --- --
But I want to make lines, using any simple geometry (e.g: the '^' symbol). So what I want is something like these: (the line may not necessarily be horizontal or vertical):
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
*****************
Note: I don't want to make line with some characters. I want to do it using any arbitrary geometries (e.g: start shape, triangle, or any other geometry). In other word I want to repeat some geometries along a linear path between two points. So these simple geometries may be rotated somehow to follow the line and ...

I think this is an interesting problem but I can't fit a satisfying answer in the stackoverflow textbox so I uploaded a proposed solution on github:
https://github.com/mrange/CodeStack/tree/master/q14545675/LineGeometry
I don't claim this is 100% solution to your problem (for one I am not 100% of all your requirements) but if you take a look at it perhaps something can be worked and improved upon.
Unless ofc I am way wrong on what you are looking for.

If I understand correctly, you'd like to use the * or ^ or ! as a line essentially. Rather then use a normal solid, dash, dotted, and so on line you'd like to use physical characters? But you'd like those characters to become a Geometry object.
You could do something like:
// Create a line of characters.
string lineString = "^^^^^^^^^^^^^^";
// Create Formatted Text, customize accordingly.
FormattedText formatText = new FormattedText(
lineString, CultureInfo.GetCultureInfo("en-us"),
FlowDirection.LeftToRight,
new Typeface("Arial"), 32, Brushes.Black);
// Set the Width and Height.
formatText.MaxTextWidth = 200;
formatText.MaxTextHeight = 100;
// You can obviously add as many customization's and outputs of your choice.
Now I understand this isn't what you want, you want the above string to act in Geometry. To accomplish that; you just need to do:
// Build Geometry object to represent text.
Geometry lineGeometry = formatText.BuildGeometry(new System.Windows.Point(0, 0));
// Tailor Geometry object that represents our item.
Geometry hGeo = formatText.BuildHighlightGeometry(new System.Windows.Point(0, 0));
Now essentially you've built a Geometry object that represents "^^^^^^^^".
Hopefully I understood correctly, I don't know if that solves your problem.

Related

Measure String in MigraDoc TextFrame

I've already tried asking the question on their forums but as yet to have received a response, hope someone can help me on here.
I have setup a custom report screen in asp.net where people can drag labels and fields and Migradoc produces this accordingly by using textframes and top/left/width/height properties to lay them out in the same place they were dragged/resized to. This all works great however one issue I have is if the text is longer than the textframe it runs off the page and I need the page to move on accordingly whilst retaining the other objects in place.
I can use the below code to measure a string:
Style style = document.Styles["Normal"];
TextMeasurement tm = new TextMeasurement(style.Font.Clone());
float fh = tm.MeasureString(value, UnitType.Millimeter).Height;
float fw = tm.MeasureString(value, UnitType.Millimeter).Width;
But it's only useful for comparing the width against the frame and not the height because it could be different once put into a smaller area. Does anyone know how I can measure this string based on bound width/height values i.e. within a text frame.
Look at the CreateBlocks() method in the XTextFormatter class and how it calls MeasureString in a loop to break the text to multiple lines.
I'm afraid you have to implement such a loop yourself.
Or maybe use the PrepareDocument() method of the DocumentRenderer class to let MigraDoc do the work and just query the dimensions when it's done.
BTW: a similar question had been asked at the forum before:
http://forum.pdfsharp.net/viewtopic.php?p=3590#p3590
Answer includes some source code.
An easy way to do this (using I-liked-the-old-stack-overflow's link) is to add the PdfWordWrapper class to your project and then calculate the dimensions of your text as follows:
var wrapper = new PdfWordWrapper(g, contentWidth); //g is your XGraphics object
wrapper.Add("My text here", someFont, XBrushes.Black);
wrapper.Process();
var dimensions = wrapper.Size; //you can access .Height or .Width
//If you want to reuse the wrapper just call .Clear() and then .Add() again with some new text

How To Customize Tesseract Ignores Noise?

I've a image like this (white background and black text). If there is not noise (as you can see: the top and bottom of number line has many noise), Tesseract can recognize number very good.
But when has noise, Tesseract try to recognize it as number and add more number to result. It is really bad. How can I make Tesseract Ignore Noise? I can't make a preprocessing image to make it more contrast or sharp text. This doesn't help anything.
If some tool can to hightlight only string line. It can be really good input to Tesseract. Please help me. Thanks everybody.
You should try eroding and dilating:
The most basic morphological operations are two: Erosion and Dilation.
They have a wide array of uses, i.e. :
Removing noise
...
you could try to down sample your binary image and sample it up again (pyrDown and PyrUp) or you could try to smooth your image with an gaussian blur. And, as already suggested, erode and dilate your image.
I see 3 solutions for your problem:
As already sugested - try using erode and dilate or some kind of blur. It's the simplest solution.
Find all contours (findContours function) and then delete all contours with area less then some value (try different values, you should find correct one quite fast). Note that the value may not be constant - for example you can try to use 80% of average contour area (just add all contours areas, divide it by number of contours and multiply by 0.8).
Find all contours. Create one dimension array of integers, with length equal to your image height. Fill array with zeros. Now for each contour:
I. Find the top and the bottom point (points with the biggest and the smallest value of y coordinate). Let's name this points T and B.
II. Add one to all elements of array which index is between B.y and T.y. (so if B = (1, 4) and T = (3, 11) then add one to array[4], array[5], array[6] ..., array[11]).
Find the biggest element of array. Let's name this value v. All contours for which B.y <= v <= T.y should be letters, other contours - noise.
you can easily remove these noises by using image processing techniques(Morphological operations like erode and dilate) you can choose opencv for this operations.
Do connected component labeling....that is blob counting....all dose noises can never match the size of the numbers....with morphological techniques the numbers also get modified...label the image...count the number of pixels in each labeled region and set a threshold (which you can easily set as you will only have numbers and noises)...cvblob is the library written in C++ available at code googles...
I had similar problem: small noises was cause of tesseract fails. I cannot use open-cv, because I was developing some feature on android, and open-cv was unwanted because of it large size. I don't know if this solution is good, but here is what I did.
I found all black regions in image (points of each region I added to own region set). Then, I check if count of point in this region is bigger than some threshold, like 10, 25 and 50. If true, I make white all points of that region.

how to measure width of a string precisely?

First of all, question How to measure width of character precisely? which is answered, doesn't really help for this case, so this isn't a duplicate of that.
I have a string. I draw using graphics.DrawString, however when I need to put another one after it, I need to know the precise width of previous string.
For this I use graphics.MeasureString with:
StringFormat format = new StringFormat(StringFormat.GenericTypographic);
format.Alignment = StringAlignment.Center;
format.Trimming = StringTrimming.None;
format.FormatFlags = StringFormatFlags.MeasureTrailingSpaces;
I have tried many other functions, just as TextRendered.MeasureText however all of them fail, with all possible combinations of parameters.
the mentioned combination of MeasureString is most close to what I need (it works in most cases, except for special characters), however using characters like # break it. The width is either shorter or longer.
Is there a way to get a precise size of text produced by DrawString function? How does the DrawString calculate the size of drawing area? It must be clearly some other function because the size always differ.
The source code of whole application is here https://gitorious.org/pidgeon/pidgeon-main/ (File where I work with this, is https://gitorious.org/pidgeon/pidgeon-main/blobs/master/scrollback/SBABox.cs)
You just need to eliminate extra width. You can do this by using string format:
GdipStringFormatGetGenericTypographic()
You could also use:
float doubleWidth = g.MeasureString(text+text,...).Width;
float singleWidth = g.MeasureString(text).Width;
float textWidth = doubleWidth-singleWidth;
This will allow you to work with other languages such as Japanese.
On codeproject, Pierre Anaud's solution was to use MeasureCharacterRanges, which returns a region matching exactly the bounding box of the specified string:
static public int MeasureDisplayStringWidth(Graphics graphics, string text, Font font)
{
System.Drawing.StringFormat format = new System.Drawing.StringFormat ();
System.Drawing.RectangleF rect = new System.Drawing.RectangleF(0, 0, 1000, 1000);
var ranges = new System.Drawing.CharacterRange(0, text.Length);
System.Drawing.Region[] regions = new System.Drawing.Region[1];
format.SetMeasurableCharacterRanges (ranges);
regions = graphics.MeasureCharacterRanges (text, font, rect, format);
rect = regions[0].GetBounds (graphics);
return (int)(rect.Right + 1.0f);
}
I'm a little late to the party here, but I was trying to do something similar and stumbled on this question. You've probably already seen the following remark from the documentation for the Graphics.MeasureString method on MSDN:
The MeasureString method is designed for use with individual strings and includes a small amount of extra space before and after the string to allow for overhanging glyphs. Also, the DrawString method adjusts glyph points to optimize display quality and might display a string narrower than reported by MeasureString. To obtain metrics suitable for adjacent strings in layout (for example, when implementing formatted text), use the MeasureCharacterRanges method or one of the MeasureString methods that takes a StringFormat, and pass GenericTypographic. Also, ensure the TextRenderingHint for the Graphics is AntiAlias.
It seems that you were trying to follow this advice because you're using StringFormat.GenericTypographic as a starting point for your custom StringFormat object. However, the line
format.FormatFlags = StringFormatFlags.MeasureTrailingSpaces;
effectively negates the fact that you started with StringFormat.GenericTypographic because it clears any previously set flags. What you probably meant to do is set the StringFormatFlags.MeasureTrailingSpaces flag while preserving the other flags, like so:
format.FormatFlags |= StringFormatFlags.MeasureTrailingSpaces;
Try to use this methods:
GDI+ (graphics.MeasureString and graphics.DrawString) >> System.Drawing.Graphics
GDI (TextRenderer.MeasureText and TextRenderer.DrawText)
It also may help you:
Write a custom measure method:
Split entry string on special characters
Use above .net methods
Calculate width of special characters and sum ...
Read Ian Boyd answer
A method using Graphics.MeasureCharacterRanges to return all the rectangles enclosing each individual letter in a string and their positions is given here: Measure character positions when drawing long strings in C#
I have used the MeasureCharactersInWord and MeasureCharacters methods from that post, then in order to find the exact width without the spaces added to each side of the string, I use this code:
var w = 0F;
var rects = MeasureCharacters(Graphics.FromHwnd(IntPtr.Zero), font, text);
if (rects.Count>0)
{
if (rects.Count == 1)
{
w = rects.First().Width;
}
else
{
var r0 = rects.First();
var rN = rects.Last();
w = rN.X - r0.X + rN.Width;
}
}
Note that the height of the rectangle is the height of the font and not of the character itself. If you need the height check this post: Determining exact glyph height in specified font
A final note: the reason why I used MeasureCharacterRanges is because all the other methods I tried were failing at giving me a bounding box without space to the left and right of the text. This post The wonders of text rendering and GDI gives a method to get the string width and remove this space using TextRenderer so the whole thing can be done in about two lines of code. I haven't checked the result though.

Find char width in pixels for various Arial fontsizes

I have a program that is manually generating a PDF using PDFsharp in C#. Although it is rather tedious I have to use it and am nearing completion of the task. Only one issue remains.
Problem: I am wondering how I can find out what the width of a given char is for a given font size in Arial.
I am having trouble coming up with a more precise text wrapping method. Right now one defines a width of box in pixels and then proceeds to write out a string in that box. I kinda just guess at the max length of the string that can fit in the box and there are some visual oddities that crop up from time to time.
Any help?
Thanks
I'm not sure from your question whether you want a way to measure the size of a string specifically using PDF#, or just a generic way.
In general .Net, you can use the MeasureText method of the TextRenderer class (from Windows forms):
TextRenderer.MeasureText("some text", new Font("Arial", 1.0f, FontStyle.Regular))
This will return a Size instance that will contain Width=12, Height=2.
In the days of True Type fonts with kerning etc. there is not a single character width.
The width of the string "VA" is probably less then the sum of the widths of the strings "V" and "A".
Summing up the widths if individual characters is a starting point - but finally you have to measure the complete string.
PDFsharp includes the class XTextFormatter (with full source code) that does this line wrapping. It can be adapted for specific requirements.
It uses gfx.MeasureString(token, this.font).Width to measure the width of a string.
XGraphics.MeasureString(string s, Font f) does the trick.
//l_Page is of type PdfPage
var l_Graphics = XGraphics.FromPdfPage( l_Page );
var l_TitleFont = new Font( "Arial", 15f, GraphicsUnit.World )
var l_Title = "Hallo Welt";
//l_TitleSize will be of type XSize and has properties for Width and Height
var l_TitleSize = l_Graphics.MeasureString( l_Title, l_TitleFont );

What's a good way to perform hit testing on a FormattedText?

I'm rendering text using FormattedText, but there does appear to be any way to perform per-char hit testing on the rendered output. It's read-only, so I basically only need selection, no editing.
I'd use RichTextBox or similar, but I need to output text based on control codes embed in the text itself, so they don't always nest, which makes building the right Inline elements very complex. I'm also a bit worried about performance with that solution; I have a large number of lines, and new lines are appended often.
I've looked at GlyphRun, it appears I could get hit-testing from it or a related class, but I'd be reimplementing a lot of functionality, and it seems like there should be a simpler way...
Does anyone know of a good way to implement this?
You can get the geometry of each character from a FormattedText object and use the bounds of each character to do your hit testing.
var geometry = (GeometryGroup)((GeometryGroup)text.BuildGeometry(new Point(0, 0))).Children[0];
foreach (var c in geometry.Children)
{
if (c.Bounds.Contains(point))
return index;
index++;
}
In OnRender you can render these geometry objects instead of the formatted text.
The best way is to design a good data structure for storing your text and which also considers hit-testing. One example could be to split the text into blocks (words, lines or paragraphs depending on what you need). Then each such block should have a bounding-box which should be recomputed in any formatting operations. Also consider caret positions in your design.
Once you have such facility it becomes very easy to do hit-testing, just use the bounding boxes. It will also help in subsequent operations like highlighting a particular portion of text.
Completely agree with Sesh - the easiest way you're going to get away with not re-implementing a whole load of FormattedText functionality is going to be by splitting up the individual items you want to hit-test into their own controls/inlines.
Consider using a TextBlock and adding each word as it's own Inline ( or ), then either bind to the inline's IsMouseDirectlyOver property, our add delegates to the MouseEnter & MouseLeave events.
If you want to do pixel-level hit testing of the actual glyphs (i.e. is the mouse exactly in the dot of this 'i'), then you'll need to use GlyphRuns and do manual hit testing on the glyphs (read: hard work).
I'm very late to the party--if the party is not over, and you don't need the actual character geometry, I found something like this useful:
for (int i = 0; i < FormattedText.Text.Length; i++)
{
characterHighlightGeometry = FormattedText.BuildHighlightGeometry(new Point(), i, 1);
CharacterHighlightGeometries.Children.Add(characterHighlightGeometry);
}
BuildGeometry() only includes the actual path geometry of a character. BuildHighlightGeometry() generates the outer bounds of all characters--including
spaces, so an index to a space can be located by:
foreach (var c in CharacterHighlightGeometries.Children)
{
if (c.Bounds.Contains(centerpoint))
{
q = c;
cpos = index;
break;
}
index++;
}
Hope this helps.

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