Feature suggestion -> Scaler resizing, Text effects

[nawmtaronyu]

being able to Re-size a skin (The whole skin) with scale, and not having to do each individual measurement withing the .ini
500x500 -> 300x300, NOT 500x500 -> 300x340 (Keep the same ratio, 1:1, 3:4, 9:16, ext)

One other thing id like to have is some text effect, so that i can have my text look like its been "Chiseled" into my images, (Drop Shadow effects, Light effects, Glow, ext)

[santa_ryan]

you can resize stuff with calcs. Not to hard.

As for the text effects, that would be pretty cool

[dragonmage]

StringEffect
Effect of the string. The valid values are: NONE, SHADOW and BORDER.

It would be nice to have more options and more control over the current ones, but you can get a semi-etched effect with SHADOW.

The scaling of skins I am not very hopeful for. There are just so manythings that what have to be accounted for , like someone using measure results or calcs for meter dimensions. I imagine there will be quite a resource hit with all the checking that would have to be done on every update.

[santa_ryan]

The scaling of skins I am not very hopeful for. There are just so manythings that what have to be accounted for , like someone using measure results or calcs for meter dimensions. I imagine there will be quite a resource hit with all the checking that would have to be done on every update.

Exactly. Your better off doing the math by yourself with a calc that will edit an entire section of variables that are dedicated to the resizing and then have the calc disable itself when it done then having it refresh itself every update.

[jsmorley]

At the end of the day everything in Rainmeter is drawn using the GDI+ API library from Microsoft. There are some built-in capabilities for rendering "fonts" which we have implemented pretty much all of. (I think underline and strikethrough might not be hard to add, they are native capabilities). Once you get outside of what is possible natively, then you are into tons of code, and still are pretty limited. GDI+ is not Photoshop...

Here is an interesting article on how you might achieve "soft shadows" and "glow effect" for strings in GDI+. A lot of code for an effect that I suspect is going to be disappointing though.

http://www.codeproject.com/KB/GDI/Glow_and_Shadow_effects.aspx

[JoBu]

Couldn't you just run two texts on top of each other, one the color of the background and one the 'dropshadow' so that it looks cut-out?

Or am I missing... a lot?

[jsmorley]

Couldn't you just run two texts on top of each other, one the color of the background and one the 'dropshadow' so that it looks cut-out?

Or am I missing... a lot?

No, you could do exactly that, offseting the X and Y for each by a pixel or two. In fact, if you really wanted to you could lay like 10 string meters on top of each other, each one successively 1 fontsize smaller, with the early ones having a lot of transparency, getting more solid as you go, and get a halfway decent "glow" effect too.

[Scolex]

What about adding button scaling similar to the way you can scale an image with W and H only using a %.
I figure H & W can't really work for scaling since a button is in effect a horizontally layered image.

After thought: obviously there would have to be some sort of calculation to round the % to a number that would
create an image size that is divisible by 3 since there are 3 sections to a button image.