HTML Power Nailer on-line documentation
Before starting to read the documentation, you might want to view some
Sample Pages created with the HTML Power Nailer
or
Visit the VirtuaMedia Home Page

You may also want to look at the Frequently asked questions page or view the latest changes in the What's new page.

Terms of use:

 Power Nailer is released as shareware. As such i make no claims of product reliability nor any support of said software. Under the shareware license you have 30 days to evaluate this program. After the 30 days evaluation period you must either register Power Nailer or stop using it and erase all content created by it.

Power Nailer was tested to be safe however by using this program you acknowledge that VirtuaMedia and the author of this program will not be held liable to any damages direct or indirect, coincidental or otherwise caused by the use or misused of this software. In conclusion, use at your own risk.

The registration process may be handled by a third party company that handles money transactions on the internet. If you have any problems with the registration process, please mail them directly.


You can scroll down to read a feature by feature explanation or you can press on the picture below to jump to a specific feature.

Several things that don't appear in the actual interface, and are important to know are: It would be wise to read these first.

If you feel you don't understand something in the working of Power Nailer or require further clarification, feel free to Mail Me










The Header File:
The Header file is an HTML file which is automatically attached to any new created page. Within this file you define the basic page settings such as the background image and window title. All these are optional, however in order for Power Nailer to work, the header file must contain a table header (As seen within the sample files provided in the Power Nailer archive).

An example of a table header syntax is:
<Table Border=2 BGCOLOR=#00003A CELLPADDING=0 CELLSPACING=0>

It is advised that you keep both CELLPADDING and CELLSPACING at zero otherwise the thumbnail might look weird or load slower.
Feel free to change the BGCOLOR (background color) and Border settings.

Another important feature in the header file is a special translation anchor. In every place Power Nailer finds the <PAGE> anchor it will automatically be replaced with the current thumbnail page number. This only occurs when the "Insert Page Number" checkbox is enabled.


The Footer File:
The Footer file is an HTML file which is automatically attached to the end of any new page created. This file contains the HTML page closing elements (see sample file).


The Directory List:
Instead of working one section (file directory) at a time, Power Nailer is able to automatically process several directories in sequence. The directory list is a text file which contain a list of directories in which Power Nailer will operate. You can see an example directory list file in the samples provided with Power Nailer (It's called "directory.list").

Inside this file, you list one directory per line,

Example:

C:\Catalog\Animals\
C:\Catalog\Family\
C:\Catalog\Travel\

And so on . . .


The Picture Directory:
If you desire to work on a single directory, simply type in the directory name into this field.

Example:

C:\Catalog\Animals


The Thumbnail Size (width & height):
Each thumbnail is in actuality a scaled down version of the original image. In these two fields, you enter the maximum width and height of each thumbnail.

There are several things you need to take into account. The first is that you probably want the width and height fields to match the vertical/horizental aspect of the screen. All screen modes except 320x200 have an aspect of 1.333333 (You can see this by doing 640/480 or 800/600). So in order to keep the correct screen aspect for lets say a thumbnail with a width of 100 pixels wide, we'll do 100/1.333333 which comes out as 75 pixels high.

The other thing you need to remember is that you have a fixed screen width, and if you make the thumbnails too big, you would not be able to fit a lot of thumbnails in one row. So you might want to think in advance of the ratio of thumbnail resolution compared to the number of thumbnails in one row and the screen mode your page is designed to be viewed at (i.e. 800x600 or 1024x768).

Good width & height values are:
  • 160x120y
  • 120x90y
  • 100x75y
  • 80x60y
  • 60x45y


The Text Box Height:
The Text Box contain all the picture text information. It always contains the picture file name, and it can optionally contain the picture file size and resolution.

The Text Box width is always set by the maximum width of the actual thumbnail picture (see above), however it's height is automatically set by the browser to the height of the font used. This might not always be desired since it may give an irregular height where one thumbnail row is higher than another.

To bypass this you can set your own height for text box. This is risk free. If for some reason the text box needs to be higher than the number you've set, the browser will automatically compensate and will set the correct height itself.

You may wish to create a test page for testing the correct text box height you desire. Of course you can leave it all to the browser and just leave this at the default setting of 16.

Note:
The height is in pixels.


The Text Box Font Size:
The default size of the font used to list the picture file name and attributes is 1, however you can change this to any number.

Note:
Numbers over 3 are very big.


Thumbnails per line:
This is the number of thumbnails that should appear in one row. When selecting this number, take into account the thumbnail resolution and the screen resolution your page is designed to be viewed at.

Example:
I design my page to be viewed at 800x600x16bit or better, i selected a thumbnail size of 100 width and 75 height. Now i also remember that the table border itself takes a bit of space and i want to leave some margins, so i set the Thumbnail per line field to 7 which gives me a margin of about 40 pixels on each side and 7 thumbnails per row.


Thumbnail Rows Per Page:
This is the number of thumbnail rows to be created within a single page. If the number of images in a directory exceeds the number of images in one page ("thumbnails per line" * "rows per page"), more than one page will be created.


JPEG Encoding Quality:
The created thumbnails are always created using JPEG encoding, the JPEG format was tested to be far smaller than GIF in most image types (16 Color or lower GIFs are smaller than JPEGs since JPEGs were designed for photo-realistic color images).

JPEG is a lossy format. This means that it will lose image quality when compressing images. The better the compression quality, the less the loss. At 100 quality there is hardly any visible loss. The lower the quality, the smaller the file size.

The default JPEG encoding quality for Power Nailer is 80. This quality is (in my view) the best size/quality compromise.


The Scaling Quality:
Since the original image size is always larger than the size our thumbnail will be scaled to, we need to downscale (shrink) the original image into our thumbnail size. Power Nailer employs five different routines to downscale an image:

Average (integer):
This is the fastest of all the scaling routines and it does not rely on the FPU (math co-processor). It uses a point routine to calculate the image.

Average (float):
Similar to Average (integer), this quality setting still uses a point routine to calculate the image, however it also uses the FPU to obtain a more accurate result.

Good (integer):
This routine uses a more complex rectangular area summing technique to get a more accurate and smoother thumbnail. Like the Average (integer) routine, it doesn't rely on the FPU and is thus faster.

Good (float):
This routine is similar to the Good (Integer) routine, but uses the FPU to obtain a more accurate thumbnail image.

Best (float):
This routine is highly CPU & FPU intensive, it uses sub-pixel calculation to provide the best and smoothest result, however, it is at least 10 to 20 times slower than any of the other routines. Use this selection only for small project.

Note:
One of the greater benefits of the Pentium II processor is that it has a very strong FPU performance compared to other processors. Due to this fact it is recommended that you use the (float) routines on a Pentium 2 machines. If the work isn't too big (under 10,000 images) you might want to use the (float) routines on other CPU types.

When designing a page, use the Average routines to set a good page layout, when you're satisfied with the page layout, create the page using one of the better quality settings.

The Best quality settings is only useful when creating rather large thumbnails, there usually isn't much benefit when used with smaller sized thumbnails.


The Text Box file name Case Setting:
This setting controls the case in which the picture file name will appear inside the text box, here are some examples:

Unchanged:
MyPic.JPG .. MyPic.JPG

Lowercase:
MyPic.JPG .. mypic.jpg

Uppercase:
MyPic.JPG .. MYPIC.JPG

Capital First:
MyPic.JPG .. Mypic.jpg


Including Picture Resolution inside the Text Box:
Enabling this feature will add the picture resolution to the text box, this only works when using the internal JPEG and GIF decoders.


Including Picture File Size inside the Text Box:
Enabling this feature will add the picture file size in kb to the text box.


Using Progressive JPEG encoding for thumbnail creation:
The JPEG format supports two encoding types. The standard decoding format, and the Progressive format. The progressive format was designed with the internet in mind. Instead of decoding the image in one pass it will use several passes (Similar to interlaced GIF, but with higher quality).

You may wish to experiment and decide which encoding type is more suited to your needs.

Notice:
You will not see any effect of progressive encoding when loading up the pages locally (from your hard disk) as the images usually load too fast.


Overwriting thumbnails:
By default Power Nailer only creates thumbnails for images that do not already have them. This is done in order to keep incremental page creation functioning.
However, for page testing purposes you may wish to enable thumbnail overwriting.

Note:
Even though the thumbnails are recreated, the HTML file will not be overwritten.


Inserting the PAGE number into the HTML page:
When this setting is enabled, Power Nailer searches for the specialized <PAGE> anchor inside the HTML Header File and replaces it with the correct page number. This only applies to Multi Page Processing.

If you do not plan to create more than one page in a directory, or if you don't want the page number listed on the pages, disable this option.

Note:
You can still have the special anchor inside the header file even if you are not going to use it, as it will be ignored by all the browsers.


Using a list of directories:
When enabled, pressing the begin button will use the Directory List file in order to obtain a list of multiple directories to work from.

When disabled, the Picture Directory will be used as a single directory to work from.


Moving of broken images:
Power Nailer can usually handle most corrupted JPEG or GIF images, but if an error occurs or the picture is simply not in the correct format (Pictures must be in either the GIF or JPEG formats, with the correct format extension), Power Nailer will move the bad image into a directory called "Broken" within the Picture Directory.

If such a directory does not exist, one will be created.

However, if you wish to have the afflicated image simply ignored, just uncheck this option.


The Begin and Abort Buttons:
Once all the settings are complete, press the Begin button to start creating the Page(s), the moment you press this button, it will disappear and an Abort button will appear in it's place. Pressing this button will abort the conversion. It is advised to exit Power Nailer after aborting a session.


The Quit Button:
Em, i think you understand this one.

But still, one small note, when you exit Power Nailer all the configuration setting are saved automatically.

To return the Power Nailer configuration to it's default settings, erase the ".cfg" file.


The Status Area:
The status area contain a lot of useful information that is updated while Power Nailer is working:

Current Dir The current working directory, this is either the Picture Directory if Use Dir List is disabled or the current directory being worked on from the
Directory List file.
Work Pic The current picture being scaled.
Page The number of the page currently being created (and the number that appears in the HTML Header file if Use Page Number is enabled.
Total Pics The number of new pictures found in the working directory.
Bad Pics The number of bad pictures found and possibly moved (if enabled) into the broken sub-directory.
Section If Use Dir List is disabled, this is always 1, if it's enabled, this is the number of directories found.
Time The time elapsed since starting the current operation.
Remaining The estimated time remaining before completion of the current operation.
Pic Count Shows you the number of the currently scaled picture.
Speed Shows you the picture creation speed in PPM (Pictures Per Minute).
Section & Total bars These are two progress bars that show you the work progress in both the current section (directory) and the total process. In cases where only one directory is involved these are the same.
Message This is a display of various work progress messages.


The Picture Box Entre:
This entre allows you to alter the default HTML code used to generate the HTML table cell that holds the image.

In here for example, you can specify special background colors or even bitmap images to be placed within behind the thumbnail.

As with anything else in the advanced menu, good understanding of the HTML language is required.


The Text Box Entre:
This entre allows you to alter the default HTML code used to generate the HTML table cell that holds the picture name, resolution and file size.

In here for example, you can specify special background colors or even bitmap images to be placed within behind the text.


The Empty Picture Box Entre:
To maintain good visualization, Power Nailer always adds empty Table cells to the bottom of a page in order to complete a row, in this entre you can alter the HTML code that generates the empty image cell.

Note that for a Table cell to exist, some information must exist within it, thus the &nbsp HTML code is used. It basicly means "non-breaking-space".


The Empty Text Box Entre:
Similar to the Empty Picture Box, this entre represents the empty text area below the empty picture.


The Picture Resolution Block:
The picture resolution block defines the structure of the picture resolution string that is inserted within the Text Box entre, you can alter this block to change the way the resolution links after the picture file name (if resolution display is enabled on the main menu).


The Picture Size Block:
The picture size block defines the structure of the picture size string that is inserted within the Text Box entre, you can alter this block to change the way the picture size links after the picture resolution (if picture size display is enabled on the main menu).


The Picture Line Start Block:
Each thumbnail row is started with a new Table Cell line command, if you wish to add or alter this commnad, this is the place to do so.


The Picture Box - > Text Box Seperator Block:
The picture and text cells are in fact two different table cells, and are seprated by a table cell line close, and a table cell line open commands, if you wish to add or alter to these commnad, this is the place to do so.


The Picture Line End Block:
Each thumbnail row ends with a close Table Cell line command, if you wish to add or alter this commnad, this is the place to do so.


The Base File Name:
The default base file name for the generated HTML files is "page", this means that each created HTML page will begin with the word "page".

Example:
page00001.html, page00002.html, page00003.html, etc...

By altering the base file name, you can change the name of the created pages. If for example you would change the base file name to "gallery", the generated HTML files would be created as:
gallery00001.html, gallery00002.html, gallery00003.html, etc..

Please remember that if you change the base file name, you must make sure that the name is acceptable by your HTML server, otherwise your server may not send the pages (enabling certain characters in the file name may work locally on a windows machine, but not on the internet, an example of such a character is the "space" character).


The Minimum Digits for an HTML file:
You would notice that each HTML file is created with leading 0 numbering (e.g. page00001.html).

In this setting you can assign the number of leading 0 characters to be added to a generated html file.

For example, changing this setting to 3 would create "page001.html" files.


The thumbnail sub-directory:
Some users prefer to have the thumbnails created within the same directory as the images. Some prefer to have the thumbnails created in a separate directory.

If no name is specified in this field, the generated thumbnails will be created within the picture directory.

If a name is specified, the thumbnails will be created within that sub-directory.

Example:
The picture directory field is set to "c:\pictures\animals"
And the thumbnail directory field is set to "TN".

All thumbnails will be created under the "c:\pictures\TN" directory.

Note:
The thumbnail sub-directory must EXIST or no thumbnails will be created.
Also, notice the "case" of the name you give since it matters on Web servers.


The Default Button:
The advanced menu is by no means simple, if you ever get into too much of a mess and wish to return to the default Power Nailer settings for this page, pressing this button will prompt you to do so.


The Help Button:
As you can see, the advanced menu contains a lot of specialized HTML tags that are converted during page creation into certain values (like the image file name, size and resolution). Pressing the help button will open a quick reference window with an explanation of what each tag does.


Loading a different configuration file:
The Power Nailer default configuration file is called "powernail.cfg". Optionally you can load different configuration files in order to keep page creation presets.


Saving a different configuration file:
The Power Nailer default configuration file is called "powernail.cfg". Optionally you can save different configuration files in order to keep page creation presets.

Note:
The default configuration file is saved automatically.


Enabling the External Decoder:
Power Nailer supports the use of an external commercial image decoder from Hand Made software to support a wide range of image formats other than the internal GIF and JPEG formats.

Using Image Alchemy, Power Nailer can support a multitudes of input formats such as BMP,TGA,PCX,PNG and many more. These formats are rarely used however support through Image Alchemy is available.

You can get Image Alchemy from Hand Made software's home page (link above). Their demo version is limited to image resolutions of 640x480 and under.

If you already own Image Alchemy, make sure you have the latest version installed otherwise Turn OFF progressive JPEG encoding since it was only added in the latest version.

A final note:
Image Alchemy comes in various EXE file names (alchemy.exe,alch386.exe, alchlong.exe), in order for Power Nailer to work with Image Alchemy, it must find it. To do that, rename the proper EXE file (alchlong.exe is the best for windows operation) into alch.exe and make sure it's in the file path.


Saving or Discarding broken thumbnails
When dealing with an external decoder, various unforseen things may occur, one of them is Image Alchemy's inability to support certain corrupt images. If such a case occurs, a broken thumbnail will result. If you want the thumbnail moved along with the badly encoded image into the broken directory, enable this feature, if disabled the broken thumbnail will be erased.


Opening a visual console window on external conversion:
Image Alchemy is a console application, this means it opens a DOS-Style window each time it runs. This will slow conversion greatly and is not recommended. If Visual conversion is enabled a console window will appear for each image Image Alchemy is called for. It is recommended to use this option only for debugging purposes.


External encoder scaling quality:
Image Alchemy supports four different types of image scaling, all are horridly slow compared with the internal scaling.

Here is some information regarding the quality setting:

A:
Ack, this quality SUCKS, it's really bad, don't use it.

B:
This is comparable to the Average quality of the internal encoder.

C:
This is comparable to the Good quality of the internal encoder.

D:
Em, this seems almost exactly like C, but is EVEN SLOWER.


External encoder JPEG encoding quality:
Image Alchemy's JPEG encoding quality seems to work on a completely different scale compared to the internal encoder. A value of 32 seems to be about the same as a value of 78 in the internal encoder.

They also say that any value over 95 is useless, so don't try going over 95.


Setting the size to define a broken thumbnail:
When Image Alchemy messes up a scaling in mid-process it seems to break the file at about 220-230bytes, a value of 250 should catch all the broken thumbnails. I believe the smallest JPEG is about 700bytes, so no real JPEGS should slip through. For safety purposes you can not set this value under 230.


The Directory Structure:
Since the release of Power Nailer v1.10 the directory structure has been greatly simplified.

As of now, all you need to do is place all your image files in the directory you pointed to, and not the "\image" sub-directory as in previous versions.

As in previous versions, all corrupted image files will be moved into the "\broken" directory within the directory you pointed to. If such a directory does not exist, it will be created automatically.

Note:
The images will only be moved if the "Move Broken Images" checkbox is checked.


Multi Page Processing:
One of the strengths of Power Nailer is it's ability to handle Multi-Page thumbnails with ease. When starting to work on a section (directory), Power Nailer does several things. First it checks if previously created pages already exist in that directory.

For Example

Power Nailer searches the dir and finds that pages:

PAGE00001.HTML
PAGE00002.HTML
PAGE00003.HTML
 Already exist.

At that point Power Nailer will automatically start working at PAGE00004.HTML. Next Power Nailer will look for images that do not have a thumbnail. All images without thumbnails will then be added to the list of pictures that require a thumbnail and will then be added to the new page. When Power Nailer exceeds the amount of thumbnails that are defined for a single page, it automatically moves on to PAGE00005.HTML, and so forth.

Using this system, when you wish to add more images to your pages, you have two choices:

  • For people who want a new sorted list and don't care about timing of pictures and catalogs, you can simply erase all the thumbnail and HTML pages (*.html, *_tn.jpg) from the picture directory and start a fresh run.
  • For people who want their pages dated and appended upon, simply copy all the new images into the picture directory and run Power Nailer. Power Nailer will automatically find the new images (since they don't have any thumbnails) and create sequential pages for them.


Multi Page Indexing:
Power Nailer creates all it's output HTML data in files called PAGExxxxx.HTML (i.e. PAGE00001.HTML, PAGE00002.HTML, PAGE00003.HTML ...);

A separate program called the HTML Power Nailing Indexer was created in order to create index files that will point to all those PAGE files. You can find it on the VirtuaMedia Home Page.














Copyright © 1998 VirtuaMedia, all rights reserved.