I'm working on an application that draws handwritten strokes. Strokes are internally stored as vectors of points and they can be transformed into std::vector<Gdiplus::Point>
. Points are so close to each other, that simple drawing of each point should result into an image of continual stroke.
I'm using Graphics.DrawEllipse
(GDI+) method to draw these points. Here's the code:
// prepare bitmap:
Bitmap *bitmap = new Gdiplus::Bitmap(w, h, PixelFormat32bppRGB);
Graphics graphics(bitmap);
// draw the white background:
SolidBrush myBrush(Color::White);
graphics.FillRectangle(&myBrush, 0, 0, w, h);
Pen blackPen(Color::Black);
blackPen.SetWidth(1.4f);
// draw stroke:
std::vector<Gdiplus::Point> stroke = getStroke();
for (UINT i = 0; i < stroke.size(); ++i)
{
// draw point:
graphics.DrawEllipse(&blackPen, stroke[i].X, stroke[i].Y, 2, 2);
}
At the end I just save this bitmap
as a PNG image and sometimes the following problem occurs:
When I saw this "hole" in my stroke, I decided to draw my points again, but this time, by using ellipse with width and height set to 1
by using redPen
with width set to 0.1f
. So right after the code above I added the following code:
Pen redPen(Color::Red);
redPen.SetWidth(0.1f);
for (UINT i = 0; i < stroke.size(); ++i)
{
// draw point:
graphics.DrawEllipse(&redPen, stroke[i].X, stroke[i].Y, 1, 1);
}
And the new stoke I've got looked like this:
When I use Graphics.DrawRectangle
instead of DrawEllipse
while drawing this new red stroke, it never happens that this stroke (drawn by drawing rectangles) would have different width or holes in it:
I can't think of any possible reason, why drawing circles would result into this weird behaviour. How come that stroke is always continual and never deformed in any way when I use Graphics.DrawRectangle
?
Could anyone explain, what's going on here? Am I missing something?
By the way I'm using Windows XP (e.g. in case it's a known bug). Any help will be appreciated.
I've made the wrong assumption that if I use Graphics.DrawEllipse
to draw a circle with radius equal to 2px with pen of width about 2px, it will result in a filled circle with diameter about 4-5 px being drawn.
But I've found out that I actually can't rely on the width of the pen while drawing a circle this way. This method is meant only for drawing of border of this shape, thus for drawing filled ellipse it's much better to use Graphics.FillEllipse
.
Another quite important fact to consider is that both of mentioned functions take as parameters coordinates that specify "upper-left corner of the rectangle that specifies the boundaries of the ellipse", so I should subtract half of the radius from both coordinates to make sure the original coordinates specify the middle of this circle.
Here's the new code:
// draw the white background:
SolidBrush whiteBrush(Color::White);
graphics.FillRectangle(&whiteBrush, 0, 0, w, h);
// draw stroke:
Pen blackBrush(Color::Black);
std::vector<Gdiplus::Point> stroke = getStroke();
for (UINT i = 0; i < stroke.size(); ++i)
graphics.FillEllipse(&blackBrush, stroke[i].X - 2, stroke[i].Y - 2, 4, 4);
// draw original points:
Pen redBrush(Color::Red);
std::vector<Gdiplus::Point> origStroke = getOriginalStroke();
for (UINT i = 0; i < origStroke.size(); ++i)
graphics.FillRectangle(&redBrush, origStroke[i].X, origStroke[i].Y, 1, 1);
which yields following result:
So in case someone will face the same problem as I did, the solution is: