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androidimagenine-patch

is it possible to work with multiple 9-patch images at the same time?

I am developing an app for android, in this app there are 30 pictures that need to be stretched for multiple screen resolution. every 10 of them have exactly the same 9-patch borders.

So here we can specify it for only 1 picture, but I have 10 pictures with exactly same sizes, but different colors.

9Patches picture

Is there any solution to work on 10 pictures at the same time ? because they already will have the same 9-patch.

Solution

  • i'm guessing you just want to save yourself the work of applying the 9patch another 9 times. you sure could automate that, but i doubt it's worth the time if it's really an one-time job.

    if this is recurring work, i'd write two small cmdline tools:

    • Script A: extract the 9patch-part from a png (just copy the outermost lines) and save it to a file

    • Script B: 9patch-part file and apply it to an existing png file

    let them work with parameters so they can be scripted easily.

    it'd be easy in java and you already know the language. estimated time for both: around 30 mins to an hour.

    remember: "9-patches" are nothing else than a 1 pixel border in a completely normal PNG image file where the color is either transparent (do not scale) or black (do scale).