John Joyce wrote:
> Cool, Dan, that looks pretty slick. I certainly couldn't have done 
> that so quickly, but I knew what basically was needed. That looks like 
> about what I was thinking of conceptually. Very nice and clean code! 
> Nice touch with downcasing file extensions too! I hate that cameras 
> all like to upcase filenames... (> <)!
> That will probably run a lot lighter than RMagick methods, I'll try it 
> out later. I've been fiddling with the RMagick API all afternoon. 
> There's a lot of documentation but some of it is lacking in clear 
> examples.
> At this point I know how to scale images and keep the aspect ratio 
> within a maximum new size, but I'd like to have the final output be 
> square with matting on the sides for portrait orientation, matting on 
> the top and bottom for landscape orientation, either one with the 
> scaled image centered.
> Will this require subsequent compositing after scaling? Or did I miss 
> a method somewhere in the docs that does all of this at once?
>
> John Joyce
>
Yes, you'll need to composite the scaled image on top of the background 
of your desired size. See  my article "Alpha Compositing - Part 1" 
[http://rmagick.rubyforge.org/src_over.html]. If you're making a lot of 
thumbnails you might also be interested in  "Making Thumbnails with 
RMagick" [http://rmagick.rubyforge.org/resizing-methods.html], which 
compares the performance of all the RMagick resizing methods.

Also if you'll tell me which parts of the documentation are lacking in 
clear examples I'll see what I can do to fix it. You can always open a 
documentation bug in the RMagick bug tracker on RubyForge.

-- 
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