So I know very little about programming all around. I'm adept at photoshop and I'm looking to automate the numbering system for making these paint by number kits. I convert the images into vector format and set a maximum number of color variations. I then use adobe illustrator to create the outlined partitions of the image by color. This is all well and good, it's automated and efficient as far as I need.
My dilemma is that I do not have a system that can number these partitions in a clear and uniform fashion. I must do this tediously in photoshop, taking hours to finish.
I am looking to create or find a system that will do this last step automatically.
My vison for how this would look would be numbers, 1-20 or so depending on the set color cap, evenly distributed across each partition in uniform font and size. The idea is that there would be a grid of 1 number (this number would be the reference to the color needed in this partition) spread across larger partitions and only a few of 1 number on the smaller partitions. It would hopefully look like so:
You can see here how tedious this can become.
I don't know how to accomplish this, but I'm wondering how complicated this process would be in theory and would it be better for me to learn how to do it myself, hire a professional, or continue the hand numbering. It's creating a labor cap on my small business that is preventing me from further growth.
Any and all help is very much appreciated; if I can provide more context or specifications I would be more than happy to do so. Thank you!
Just for fun I've managed to tweak old Johnware's script (Circle Fill). Now it can fill with given letters (numbers for example). It works to a degree, but the result far from ideal:
Probably it can be used for start.
I believe a real programmer could make it way better.
My tweaked version of the script is here: https://disk.yandex.ru/d/Ze4-1DQoNRVF1g
Update
I'm improved the script further. Now it:
works more precise
handles several selected paths
remembers values in the dialog window
sets font size
Here is the is the updated version of the script: https://disk.yandex.ru/d/0pcpLDGrfQKMJA
It took me about 15 minutes to do this:
But I had to to split some complex paths with a Knife tool. Sometimes the script throws a some mystical error. I've just selected another set of paths an run the scripts again and again.
It is not a final result but it's close. I think it's much faster that to do it manually.
It can be done with script to some degree. It will work fine for simply forms. But for complicated forms it will be too hard to calculate where you need to put all numbers and how many number will be enough.
But I saw scripts that can fill any form with any symbols. So it's possible to fill any form with numbers, I think, technically.
Of course, if you aren't a seasoned coder it makes no sense to try to do it at home. You need a pro (not even me).
And I see another very simply options as well:
It doesn't even need a script. What do you think?
Related
I'm playing the game Factorio, where you build a factory.
For the time being, I made a kind-of flowchart using libreoffice calc to calculate how many machines I need to produce a certain material.
Example image from the spreadsheet
Each block has a recipe saved (blue). This recipe includes what and how much it produces and needs and how much time it takes.
It takes the demand from the previous Block (yellow) and, using the recipe, calculates how many machines (green) it needs to fulfill this demand.
Based on the amount of machines it calculates its own demands (orange).
Then the following blocks do the same, until it has reached the last block.
Doing this in a spreadsheet does work, but it is quite a tedious task.
I showed this to my dad, as I'm quite proud of what I made, and he said that maybe a database would be more suitable.
I definitely see its advantages. For example I could easily summarize the final demands of raw resources, or the total power consumption, etc.
So I got myself Microsoft Access, and I'm pretty lost now. I know the basics of Databases and some SQL-Coding, but I'm not quite sure how I would make this.
My first attempt was:
one table for machines. It includes the machines production speed and other relevant stats.
one table for recipes. Each recipe clearly states what it produces, what it needs, the amount of each, and whether or not it is a basic. Basic means that it is a raw resources, i.e. the production chain would end with this.
one table for units. Each unit has a machine, a recipe and an amount. For example I would have one unit using basic assemblers to produce iron gears. This unit also says how many machines there are, so it needs more and produces more.
I did manage to make a query that calculates the total in and outputs of all units based on their machine and recipe, as well as a total energy consumption.
However, that is nowhere near the spreadsheet I made.
For now we can probably set the Graphical overlay aside, that would probably be quite a bit overkill. However what I do want to be able to make:
enter how much I want of a certain resources
based on that entry the database would create a new table. The first entry would be the unit that produces the requested resources. The second would fulfill the firsts demand, the third fulfills the seconds demand, and so on.
So in the end I would end up with a list of units that will produce my requested resource.
I hope someone can help me. There are programs out there that already do this kind of stuff, but I want to do this myself. If this is a problem that a database isn't suited for, then please tell me so.
Thanks for any help!
i have never used game-maker before, but it seemed pretty easy to use for my school project. I want to make a small racing game, but the car has varying degrees of delay in the controls. The project is for exploring latency. so the delay in the controls could be like .05 seconds or .5 seconds, but it has to save the inputs and output in that order. Do you know how i can do this? i don't really know any commands in the language so any help would be greatly appreciated.
Also id like to add a survey sheet at the end that save the data to like an excel file, is this possible with gml?
A common way to simulate latency would be to create one or more ds_queue that you add new inputs in and pull inputs for the current frame from. The queue's initial size will determine the latency in frames.
For data export, the easiest is to produce a CSV/TSV, which is but a text file with comma or tab separators and can be imported into a wide variety of sheet-editing software.
I am using optaplanner 8.4.1 and constraint flow API.
Does optaplanner have a way to output the best solution to the problem based on simple constraints, and then input the solution into complex constraints to find the best solution? Can this speed up the time to the best solution?
Constraints are too complex and slow, especially when you use groupby and toList methods. My current logic involves the judgment of consecutive substrings.
For example: there are 10 positions and 10 balls with serial numbers. The color of the ball can be white, black or red. At this point, you need to line up 10 balls into 10 positions. It is required that the white balls must be piled together. The white balls have a range of 4 to 6; the position here is the planning entity, and the ball is the planning variable. Here we need to calculate how many continuous white balls there are. Constraint flow currently only supports 4 bases, so it can only be judged in the form of groupBy and toList
You can't do that as a single solver currently, but you should be able to do that by running 2 Solvers (with a different SolverConfig) one after another. For you example you could have BasicConstraintProvider with the hard constraints and a FullConstraintProvider that extends the basic one and adds the soft constraints.
That being said, I'd first invest time in improving the score calculation speed (see info log or a benchmark report), to avoid such workarounds all together. That number should be above 10 000.
Also, FIRST_FEASIBLE_FIT might be intresting to look at.
I don't know the details of your problem, but what I am doing is:
Run solver for some time (maybe even using less number of constraints), then serialize solution it provides
Run solver second time (could be with different settings) providing previous solution as a problem, it will keep looking for better one.
It works for me in version 8.30.
Maybe it will help somebody else.
I have developed two differing methods in MATLAB which aim to analyse a pop song and then automatically create a 30 second audio thumbnail (a preview clip) containing part of the chorus section.
Both methods have varying results:
The first method can create a thumbnail for each track, managing to find a chorus section in 40 out of 50 tested songs
The second method only managed to work on 30 out of the 50 songs, and it found the chorus section 21 times out the 30.
Obviously I know which method is superior, but I need to describe and explain the results in a report which requires the demonstration of proper statistical testing.
Other academic papers have previously used an f-test to do this, but because their methods are vastly superior, their aims are usually involve the detection of chorus onset times with 100% accuracy.
My aim is more relaxed as I am just looking for the generated thumbnails to contain any part of the chorus, regardless of onset.
Can anyone suggest some objective tests that I could possibly explore with regards to my project? This is my first time conducting an investigation like this so my experience/knowledge is incredibly low.
Thank you!
Possibly, the way for you is formating your song track with time cuts for relevant information about type of sound(chorus, etc). In sound editor like CoolEdit, you can set time cuts and assign names for theirs like 'chorus', 'pause','music'... Then, you must extract cut information to import in Matlab. For Windows 32 can be used utility Wav2labs from http://www.pallier.org/ressources/wspot/sig2wav/toolswav.html; http://www.pallier.org/ressources/wspot/sig2wav/Wav2labs.exe This program extract cuts to text file and you can read with Matlab textscan function.
After all, only segmentation accuracy must be proceed, like percent time when signal type(chorus/not chorus) was recognized correctly
Or specify your question more exactly
There are lots of non-image-based CAPTCHA ideas floating around. But what about the old-fashioned way?
What are the elements of a good image CAPTCHA? What visual elements are hard for computers, but easier for humans? What about mistakes, elements that are easier for computers than they are for humans? What are good techniques for increasing the speed of a CAPTCHA generator?
Here's an example of a CAPCHA I've been working on. It generates the functions for two sine waves, then stretches a text between them. It lays that over a background drawn from a pool of images.
How could this be improved? (Specifically, I'm using PHP GD.) Things that come to mind are:
Change the color of the text, possibly making it multicolored.
Add "scratches" or marks that mildly obscure the text.
Add to the distortion so that it's affected by sine waves horizontally as well.
What goes into a superb image CAPTCHA?
Edit:
I know that there are some very worthy third-party CAPTCHA resources. I'm looking for attributes that make them good. I'd like to use my own CAPTCHAs, just for the purpose of self-improvement. So, you can talk about reCAPTCHA, but it's not exactly what I'm looking for.
Also, it has been brought up that not only the image, but also the experience matters, so feel free to comment on that.
Make each letter/number out of a pattern, I.E. unconnected dots. Meaning the computer has no way of knowing that a dot is part of a letter other than pattern recognition (which they don't have yet.) Then the usual distortions and random lines.
How you do this is the challenge.
EDIT: Also, bonus points for patterns of different shapes, and try alpha transparency on the characters (on the edges or the whole character), so they merge with the background.
Make letters difficult to separate. Use handwriting-like font or add lines that join letters. Decrease and randomize spacing between letters.
Add wave distortion in other axis too. Distortion in one axis only can be relatively easily analyzed and reversed.
Don't bother with color background at all. It's super-easy to automatically filter black from other colors. Your background hinders only humans.
Don't add scratches or other noise unless it has the same thickness as letters. Noise-removal algorithms can easily remove things that are thinner than letters.
What if the color of the letters faded into other colors... for instance the 5 can start off as yellow on top and fade into blue or something. The colors chosen should be random.
With the multicolored background it might make it hard for the computer to pickup where the background ends and the character begins.. and hopefully it would not be too difficult for the human to actually pick up the pattern.
Instead of generating captcha you can create a captcha table in your database and you yourself create the table by search on google for good captcha images.
So no need to worry "Will this generation method work?"
I really hate CAPTCHA on sites, they just annoy me, but if you want to try and make a robust one try the following:
Ability to get a new image without submitting
Spoken version for the visually impaired
Non-uniform characters
I've used Recaptcha on a few sites, it's a nice and robust solution.
Or if you want to be really funky about it check out this: http://research.microsoft.com/asirra/
Algorithms that try to break captcha are pattern matchers that work by a few different ways: scaling and skewing the symbols that they already know about, finding and tracing edges, and counting interior holes to help. If you can break the letter up into pieces, vary the letter quality, or add strong lines or “scratches” along the letters these techniques will help. However all of this is fairly moot considering we have recaptcha for this purpose and it’s a wonderful third party app for this. Additionally captcha will help the security of your site, but will not stop those who are truly enticed.
I like the idea of KittenAuth and Microsoft's Asirra project. The idea is that, while OCR will eventually evolve to break your traditional captcha, the ability to distinguish a kitten from a dog is many orders of magnitude more complex a problem, while absolutely trivial for humans.
This solution, while probably the sexiest captcha idea ever, has the limitation of not being easily portable to hearing-impaired methods.
What about shearing and shuffling bands to mangle display and mouse-only input?
Start by taking your sine-wave morphed text, divide into horizontal bands or maybe even a grid.
That makes optical recognition harder and might allow you to avoid the kind of nasty background games that make some captchas hard for humans.
For a site where you can rely on local drag in the browser, instead of typing in an entry use shuffling requiring the user to re-order pieces (just in sloppy order, not like one of those puzzles). Or, if you wanted to use clicks alone, the classic sliding tile puzzle.
Note, I've run into a captcha where you had to identify which of N cartoons had an animal in them which succeeded in blocking me!
Wellington Grey sums up the AI CAPTCHA race nicely.
You could add a random array of fonts so that GD renders each character using a different one.
Be wary of suggestions of ReCaptcha. I have submitted incorrect input into it a couple few dozen times, and have had success each time. Several of those times I have submitted incorrect input for both words rather than just the most obscured word; the success rate, as I said, has been 100%.
I also think that image-based CAPTCHAs are user-hostile and should be avoided wherever possible. The advantage of text-based solutions is that you can tailor them to your site's audience, adding a level of obscurity that may trip up machines as they become more savvy with text-based solutions.
At the very least, don't use this all the time:
(source: codinghorror.com)