Composition Guides

Composition Guides are text files you can use to create custom overlays for the Crop transformation. These text files must have the extension .composition guide and be placed in the Composition Guides sub-folder of the default settings folder (normally located at My Documents\Picture Window Pro. The filename of the composition guide will then appear at the end of the Grid menu in the Crop transformation.

The format of a composition guide file is as follows:

CompositionGuide 1.0

line x0 y0 x1 y1

.

.

.

line x0 y0 x1 y1

end

The first line identifies the file type and format version number.

The last line identifies the end of the file.

In-between are a series of line descriptors -- for each one, a line is drawn in the crop box overlay. There is a limit of 100 lines per composition guide.

Coordinates are decimal numbers that must in the range from 0.0 to 1.0.

For x coordinates, 0.0 is the left edge of the crop box and 1.0 is the right edge.

For y coordinates, 0.0 is the bottom edge of the crop box and 1.0 is the top edge.

The overlay rotates with the crop box .

For example, the following file creates diagonal lines connecting the corners of the crop box:

CompositionGuide 1.0

line 0 0 1 1

line 0 1 1 0

end