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                     Release 2.1.0, 21 November 2008
                  Vrai Stacey <vrai@acherondevelopment.com>
                  http://vrai.net/project.php?project=birt


About
-----


BIRT, the Batch Image Resizing Thing, is a simple application that allows a
large number of images to be resized in one go. Obviously this is possible by
scripting ImageMagick but it's usually somewhat easier with a GUI. It was
created in order to learn how to develop using the Qt library, and to
facilitaty the maintenance of an online photo album where each hi-res photo
needs a low-res copy and a thumbnail. 


Usage
-----


BIRT is very simple to use: simply select the image files to be resized, enter
the new size, select the output directory and press "Go". A more detailed
instruction set, include explanations of the ratio options and output
suffix/prefix fields can be found in the "How To Use BIRT" section of the help. 
To access this online help simply start the application and click on the
"Help" button at the bottom of the BIRT window.


Building
--------


BIRT is built using the Qt toolkit and so can be compiled on most Unix style
operating systems (including OS X) and Microsoft Windows. Note that there are
binary releases for both OS X (10.5 onwards) and Windows available on the
project website.

The compilation process for Unix style systems is:

  1. Ensure that Qt is correctly installed and is version 4.3 or newer.
     Those using a package management system (e.g. apt, portage, etc ...)
     should check that the Qt development libraries are installed, these are
     usually named along the lines of "libqt4-dev".

  2. Ensure that a recent version of GCC (or equivalent compiler for your
     platform) is installed. If you built Qt4 yourself then there's no need to
     worry. If you're using a package management system, make sure that your
     GCC package is at least version 4.0.0.

  3. Edit the "birt.pro" project and change the installation directory (it's
     the "INSTALL_PATH" entry) if required.

  4. Run "qmake" to generate the Makefile.

  5. Run "make" to build BIRT using the newly generated Makefile.

  6. Run "make install" to copy the BIRT files to the installation directory
     (see 3). 

  So to build and install BIRT in the default directory you'd run:

     qmake
     make
     make install

BIRT, like all Qt apps, can be compiled on Windows using the free MinGW
compiler using a process that's essentially identical to the one above. The
process below covers building BIRT using the Microsoft Visual Studio 2008
Express IDE (available as a free download for non-commerical use from the
Microsoft website):

  1. Ensure that Qt and Visual Studio are correctly installed. If you are
     installing these for the first time, there's a good guide to the process
     available here: http://www.pc-maniac.com/?p=59

  2. Assuming everything is correctly installed and your environment variables
     are setup: open a command prompt, go to where the BIRT source code
     resides and run "qmake -t vcapp".

  3. The qmake command should have created a new file called "birt.vcproj" in
     the BIRT source code directory, open this using Visual Studio.
 
  4. Go to the "Build" menu and open the "Configuration Manager". Here you can
     select either the Release or Debug build. Unless you're actually doing
     some debugging you'll probably want Release.

  4. Go to the "Build" menu again and this time select "Build Solution" (or
     just press F7). Once the build has finished there should be a new
     "release" subdirectory in the BIRT source code directory. This contains
     the newly built BIRT binary.

Bugs
----

Any bugs or unexpected behavoir should be reported to Vrai
<vrai@acherondevelopment.com>. If bugs aren't reported they can't be fixed!

