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Images

Tue, 2007-08-07 21:20 by admin · Forum/category:

Our web site allows to add images to articles or forum topics by means of the Images command at the top. There are a few points to remember:

  1. You cannot add images to a comment or a reply, but you can add them to the original article at the top, e.g. to a forum topic.
  2. Don't use fancy image filenames. Letters, preferably lower case, and numbers and the underscore character will certainly work. Spaces can cause problems for some users. Other characters may cause more severe problems. For example, an apostrophe (') or an ampersand (&) in the file name will cause an error message on the user's browser and will spoil functions like click-to-enlarge and the gallery.
  3. The CMS automatically reduces images whose longer side is larger than 800 pixels to a length of 800 pixels. The originally uploaded image is then immediately discarded, to protect against theft of the high-quality image.
  4. The system may produce errors when confronted with extremely large pictures. If you get such an error, reduce the image by reducing the longer side to 800 pixels or less, so the CMS doesn't have to reduce again, which would lead to a somewhat poorer image quality.

Technical background: The special characters problem is a flaw in the CMS (Content Management System) we are using. I have filed a bug report for it, but it won't be fixed instantly or may not be fixed at all. I also try to fix badly named image files when I see one, available time permitting.

Hans

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hcroze's picture

Apostrophes

Wed, 2007-08-08 06:08 by hcroze

Ever since I spent a long time a couple of years ago discovering why something wouldn't work in ArcGIS (the reason was an apostrophe in a file or directory name), I've formed the habit of using underlines (_) instead. Suspect that if an industry standard like ESRI's GIS software doesn't like apostrophes, then there are probably a lot of other programmes as well.

Thx, Hans, for the guidelines.

_________
HC

Hans's picture

It's still a defect in the software.

Wed, 2007-08-08 08:05 by Hans

Of course the software shouldn't accept data that it then cannot handle. It is clearly a defect in the software, both here and in ArcGIS (unless it's clearly stated in the documentation---then it would be a weakness or a flaw). I'm saying this so nobody puts the blame on himself, which would be totally unfounded.

But that doesn't help us. Until the makers fix it, we have to use workarounds, the obvious one here being to avoid special characters in filenames.

What is almost universally guaranteed to work is lower case letters, digits, and the underscore. What will likely work is upper case letters (though there is a huge difference between Windows and Unix/Linux here; Windows considers them the same, while the others differentiate) and the hyphen. What may cause problems here and there is the space character (often has to get special treatment, like encoding as %20), and what can cause all kinds of problems is other special characters, which often have special meanings and functions, particularly the apostrophe (') and the ampersand (&), but probably also some other special characters.

Since I've filed a bug report on this for the Node Image module, there's a fair chance that we'll get this fixed here, but don't hold your breath. We have an even better chance to get automatic picture size reduction, which, I believe, is already in the current development version. [Addendum] Yes, we have it now. I've set it to reduce to 800 pixels, so you don't get your high-resolution photos stolen.

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