BGRABitmap tutorial

Welcome to the index of the tutorials for the BGRABitmap library. You can browse tutorials by number with the bar on the top, or by the following categories:

Install BGRABitmap and draw basic shapes

TBGRABitmap images have drawing functions using floating point coordinates or integer coordinates.

• Installing BGRABitmap (No. 1)
• Loading and displaying an image (No. 2)
• Drawing with the mouse (No. 3)
• Line styles (No. 6)
• Splines and Bézier curves (No. 7)
• Text functions (No. 12)
• Integer coordinates and floating point coordinates (No. 13)

Textures and scanners

Pixels are a table in memory containing values in the TBGRAPixel format. At this level, we can do various operations:

• Direct pixel access with Scanline (No. 4)
• Combining layers of pixels (No. 5)
• Generating textures (No. 8)
• Phong shading using textures (No. 9)
• Texture mapping (No. 10)
• Using scanners to combine transformations (No. 11)

Other drawing contexts

It is possible to have other contexts, that provide/allow other basic drawing functions:

• Standard Canvas (Canvas and CanvasOpacity properties) : avoid using it because of the slowness of conversions of bitmap data
• Canvas with features brought by BGRABitmap (CanvasBGRA property, Brush and Pen have an Opacity property)
  • How to convert your application from TCanvas to CanvasBGRA (video)
• Drawing with a 2D canvas with affine transformations (No. 14)
• Real 3D rendering (No. 15)
• Using textures with 3D rendering (No. 16)

More

You can use BGRABitmap to improve TAChart rendering.

You can use it as well to display icons with the SVG Image List.

More classes are available (you need to create them when you need them):

• TBGRATextEffect, in unit BGRATextFX, allows to prepare the drawing of text line, to add effects like contour and shadow.
• TBGRALayeredBitmap, in unit BGRALayers, allow to create a multi-layered bitmap. Units BGRAPaintNet and BGRAOpenRaster contain implementations to read and write in Paint.NET format (read only) and OpenRaster format (read and write).
• Units BGRAGradientScanner and BGRATransform contain scanners to do various effects.
• Unit BGRAGradients contain procedures to generate gradients and TPhongShading class for Phong shading.
• TBGRACompressableBitmap, in unit BGRACompressableBitmap, allow to store and compress images.

See list of all units.

Some units contient low level functions, and you should not need to use them for a normal usage.

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From the Free Pascal wiki, page "BGRABitmap tutorial", as it stood on 2024-04-03 after a change by Circular, out of the wiki's dump of 2024-05-26. Copyright stays with the author who wrote it, according to the old wiki's Licensing page. If you have concerns about this material, message the admin.