Some progress on the comic downloader.

I’ve got programmatic image manipulation largely done. The process is basically this: Render the SWF text layer at twice the size of the JPG background layer, then make it transparent and scale down to fit. (That makes the output quality a bit better.)

To test things out I used the command-line ImageMagick tools:

convert -fuzz 115 foreground.png -transparent “#ff00ff” -resize 1000×1500 foreground-transparent.png
composite foreground-transparent.png background.jpg final.png

Then I added the MagickNet DLL (a .NET wrapper for the ImageMagick libraries) to my project and rewrote the steps in C#:

MagickNet.Magick.Init();
MagickNet.Image imgForeground = new MagickNet.Image(Application.StartupPath + @”\foreground.png”);
imgForeground.ColorFuzz = 115;
MagickNet.Color imgColour = new MagickNet.Color(255, 0, 255);
imgForeground.Transparent(imgColour);
Size imgSize = new System.Drawing.Size(1000, 1500);
imgForeground.Resize(imgSize);
imgForeground.Write(Application.StartupPath + @”\foreground-transparent.png”);
MagickNet.Image imgBackground = new MagickNet.Image(Application.StartupPath + @”\background.jpg”);
MagickNet.Image imgForegroundTransparent = new MagickNet.Image(Application.StartupPath + @”\foreground-transparent.png”);
imgBackground.Composite(imgForegroundTransparent,0,0,CompositeOperator.AtopCompositeOp);
imgBackground.Write(Application.StartupPath + @”\final.png”);
MagickNet.Magick.Term();

Much to my surprise, it worked! Here’s what the input and output images look like:

Foreground

Transparent foreground (note: some browsers can’t render transparent PNG files correctly)

Background

Final

It’s not perfect, because if you zoom in 1200% you can see some purple left on the edges of the speech balloons:

However the goal is not in creating pristine archive copies for hoarding, but temporary copies for convenient reading. So it’s fine. :)

Next up is to see if I can replicate the full MDCU login process. The current method involves: logging in normally, opening a comic, then viewing the HTML source of the page to get the session id and issue id, then pasting those into my program. Not terribly convenient.