Rounded Corners With Online Image Editor

Lately, I wanted to put rounded corners onto an image. I couldn’t do this easily with several of my usual tools for images (Greenshot, Paint.Net, IrfanView).

To help came a free online image editor. Many languages can be selected, including german, english, spanish, bulgarian, japanese.
Rounding corners is simple. You can select the radius of the corner in pixels, the thickness of the border and the color of the border.

A Tool to Shrink pngs: Pngquant

Sometimes it is needed or wanted to shrink pngs in file size. There is a fine tool for doing this and it is called pngquant. It is available for Windows, Mac, Linux and even Android, as commandline utility or with GUI or as library.

With this tool, we could reduce our pngs of technical drawings to around one third of their former size with no visible difference.
Compare: above before shrinking, 149 kB, below after shrinking, 36 kB.

Epic Browser

Since some time, the video downloadhelper addon of Firefox did not work well for me. Now I’ve found the Epic Browser.

  • It is based on Chromium and fast.
  • It has got a working video downloader built in.
  • It’s got an adblocker built in.
  • It is dedicated to protect privacy as a number one concern.

Inkscape

Inkscape is a free, platform independent tool to work on vector graphics like svgs. Additionally it has got good commandline batch processing facilities which makes it the tool of choice for programmers.

See an example of how to crop or trim many svg files by commandline.

Inkscape to Batch Convert Image Files

Eps to Svg

Inkscape and Eps on Windows

Inkscape on Windows cannot handle eps-files by default. To be able to handle eps-files, it needs Ghoststcript. A fine description of what is to do to install Ghostscript so that Inkscape can handle eps files.

Script

To convert a lot of eps files to svg files at once, you can use tclkitsh and the following script:

set pathToInkscape "C:/Program Files/Inkscape/inkscape.exe"
set epsFiles [glob *.eps]

foreach f $epsFiles {
    set fbasename [file rootname [file tail $f]]
    if ![file exists $fbasename.svg] {
        puts  "$pathToInkscape  $f --export-plain-svg=$fbasename.svg"
        exec  $pathToInkscape $f --export-plain-svg=$fbasename.svg
    }
}

How?

  1. Save the script as EpsToSvg.tcl.
  2. Open the script in an editor and adapt the pathToInkscape. Save.
  3. Open a command shell and cd to the directory where your eps files are located.
  4. Then run tclkitsh EpsToSvg.tcl.

Svg to Pdf

To convert a lot of svg files to pdf files at once, you can use tclkitsh and this script:

This script creates one pdf from every svg in the current directory. 

set pathToInkscape "C:/Program Files/Inkscape/inkscape.exe"
set inputFiles [glob *.svg]

foreach f $inputFiles {
    set fbasename [file rootname [file tail $f]]
    if ![file exists $fbasename.pdf] {
        puts  "$pathToInkscape  $f --export-pdf=$fbasename.pdf"
        exec  $pathToInkscape $f --export-pdf=$fbasename.pdf
    }
}

Inkscape Without Gui

There is the additional commandline parameter -z or --without-gui which prevents that Inkscape opens a window when using with commandline only. Pitily, it seems that most of the --verb commands do not work without gui. It’s been reported as bug in 2011 but not fixed until at least 2017.