Rezenerator

Rezenerator icon

Rezenerator is a tool aiming at automating drawable management while building an Android app. The way it works is simple, you provide in a directory your "source" drawable files, such as SVG files, PSD files or high resolution PNG files, and the tool will automatically generate the corresponding PNG files in the required res/drawable-* folders of your application.

Operating principle

Rezenerator is highly configurable and flexible. The transformations to apply to the sources file are encoded within the file names using this simple schema :

android_id.definition_name.processor_name.ext

android_id is the android identifier of the resource, the generated files will have the name android_id.png
definition_name is the definition to use to process this resource. A definition is a properties file telling to Rezenerator the sizes of the drawables to generate and the folders where to put them. Common definitions (launcher icons, notification icons...) are provided with the tool, and it is easy to create new ones
processor_name is the processor to use. A Processor is a java class doing the conversion between the input file and the generated one. Rezenerator provides processors for common files format (SVG, PNG, ...) and you can provide yours as well
ext is the extension of the source file, nothing new here !

Rezenerator is available as a standalone jar, a maven plugin and soon a gradle plugin.

Definition syntax

A definition is a properties file, here is an example :

# get everything that was defined in base_drawable.properties
# base_drawable defines hdpi, xhdpi and xxhdpi images sizes in terms of the mdpi one
rezenerator.extends  = base_drawable

# the mdpi image is  42px x 24px  (height x width)
rezenerator.val.mdpi = 42x24

# ldpi image has the size of the hdpi one divided by two. 
rezenerator.def.ldpi = hdpi.divide(2)

Available processors

ImageMagick for lots of formats (including PNG, PSD, JPG ...)
ImageMagickJpg for lots of formats, with an output as a jpg file (usefull for photos)
Inkscape for SVG files (and every other format Inkscape can open)
InkscapeMagick for same formats as the Inkscape processor, but using a bit of ImageMagick for anti-aliasing

Please note that these processors use external tools that must be installed and accessible in the path.

How to use it ?

At the moment, you have two options

Standalone jar

You can grab the last version in the release section of Github.

Maven plugin

You can also use the maven plugin (available on maven central), here is a basic example configuration to use in the pom of your project :

<build>
    <plugins>
        <plugin>
            <groupId>com.tlorrain.android.rezenerator</groupId>
            <artifactId>rezenerator-maven-plugin</artifactId>
            <version>1.0-RC2</version>
            <executions>
                <execution>
                    <goals>
                        <goal>generate</goal>
                    </goals>
                </execution>
            </executions>
        </plugin>
  </plugins>
</build>

By default, Rezenerator will process files in the drawable folder and output them in the correct res/drawable-* folder.

For a more complete example, take a look at the pom of the rezenerator-maven-sample project. The configuration in the sample is more convenient: it will take over completely the management of the res folder (we use the res folder and not one in the target folder because otherwise the project cannot be imported in Eclipse). Files processed by Rezenerator are then located in the src/main/android/drawable directory. Every other files that should normally be placed in the res folder are in src/main/android/res. It is then easier to use a SCM (you just have to exclude the res folder) and you can use the src/main/android/res folder as an overlay (any file you put in there will still be available to Android and will take precedence over the ones Rezenerator generates). Note that src/main/android/res is processed by the maven-resource-plugin and you can use filtering on it !

The maven plugin works in Eclipse with m2e, you will have to refresh the project (F5) after adding a new image of after the first import.

Note

This is still a work in progress !

Building Rezenerator

If you want to test the latest development version, just clone the repository, install Maven 3.1.1 and run a mvn clean install. You'll need to have Inkscape and ImageMagick (convert) in you path in order to be able to run the tests. You can skip tests by adding -DskipTests to the command line. You will also need a recent version of the Android SDK in order to build the sample.

Licence

Licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0 (the "License"); you may not use this file except in compliance with the License. You may obtain a copy of the License at

http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0

Unless required by applicable law or agreed to in writing, software distributed under the License is distributed on an "AS IS" BASIS, WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY KIND, either express or implied. See the License for the specific language governing permissions and limitations under the License.

fredszaq / Rezenerator

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