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Enchanter Joined: 10 Oct 2000 Posts: 656 Location: USA

Does anybody know of a links where I can find .emf and bitmap images that I can use on my map. I'd perfer emf images so that they will resize when I resize the map.

I'm specifically looking for images I can use to denote:
a City
a Castle
a Fountain
a house

Also, does anybody know of any good graphic programs that will save in the .emf formatso I can import them into zMapper?

Posted: Sat Jul 19, 2003 8:55 pm

EMF is the internal format used to save shapes to the Windows clipboard. So, you probably won't find any programs that specifically save to EMF format (or maybe you will), but any program that supports copy/paste should work.

For example, when testing I often am using Corel draw. I can create shapes in Corel draw, then select the objects, copy to clipboard, go to the shape editor in zMapper and do a Paste.

Also note that EMF and bitmaps are completely different. The bitmap editor does its copy/paste using the Windows BMP format. Again, most bitmap editors support this. When I'm in Corel PhotoPaint I can copy a bitmap and then go to the bitmap editor in zMapper and do a paste.

Enchanter Joined: 10 Oct 2000 Posts: 656 Location: USA

ok, I'm playing around with the pasting now, but I cannot seem to get a image to paste in the center of the room. My images all end up in way to the upper left corner. And since this is for a hex map, the image gets displayed on the map between 2 hexes. Any idea on what I'm doing wrong here?

Also, when I go to resize shape, if I use new width of 50%, it makes the image bigger, and if i use new width of 300% it makes it smaller. This sounds backwards to me?

using the offset, just seems to make the image go further out to the left instead of in the center, and i will not allow me to use a negative offset.

Enchanter Joined: 10 Oct 2000 Posts: 656 Location: USA

One more thing, when I past the image in, it displays as a full rectangle with white background. The hex room may have a brown room color, so now I get this ugle white box with the image inside it. is there a way to prevent this?

Posted: Sun Jul 20, 2003 2:09 am

Pasting always puts the image in the upper left. But you can just drag it to where you want it since it's already selected.

Also, are you talking about pasting a bitmap or a shape? With a bitmap it can only paste a rectangular set of pixels, so the color of the rectangle will be whatever the color of the bitmap in the clipboard was.

For shapes, you need to set the fill color in the original program so that the rectangle is not filled. Some graphics programs might be filling the entire shape that you copy/paste with the background color of the original program, so you'll have to consult the other program for how to select and copy an object without getting the background color.

You can also try selecting the rectangle and then selecting the No Fill color within the shape editor itself.

Before you mess around with shapes and stuff too much, you will need an understanding of how the Meta file format works in Windows. Each object is separate, including the brushes used for filling and stuff. You can play with the raw metafile data in the shape editor to see more how it works.

In other words, your rectangle is not just a single object...it's several objects that include the rectangle itself, the brush used to fill the rectangle, and the pen used to draw the rectangle. Different graphics programs add more junk to this data.

In addition to Corel Draw, I've tested this stuff just using the drawing tools in Microsoft Word. You can draw a rectangle in Word and then copy/paste it into the Shape editor in zMapper.

As I said before, you really just need to experiment with all of this.