Web Development Image Chopping Tool

Hi all,

Deary me, 3 posts in as many days, i appear to be quite the chatterbox recently. If I ever finish this disasterous project ive been landed with I might actually update my blitzmax and have a play around with all the new stuff that ive missed over the last few months. But until then, i have a question for all you web developers...

Im looking for a freeware (or cheap) tool that allows me to load a jpg or even a PDF (and zoom it to the size i want), drag in rulers to set the top, bottom, left and right of a page and then other rulers that would act as slicers. These rulers would

The idea is, I load a jpg of a design from a studio and can drag rulers onto it it horizontally and vertically to make up rectangular/square regions overlaying the image.

I then hit a magic button when this is in place and...

a) it chops the big image up into smaller images (based on the regions created by the rulers) and saves them all out to a directory (each region should have a name assigned before the chop)

b) a CSS file and HTML that would re create the image in HTML so that us coders dont have to bother chopping up design images and could get on with coding (or could chop new images of correct dimensions out of mock ups).


So, my question, aside from dreamweaver, is there anything that can do this?

Free or very cheap is always a bonus.

Cheers.
A

it seems you can do it with The Gimp and a python add-on script:

http://www.communitymx.com/content/article.cfm?page=4&cid=24B48

I tend not to slice graphics this way these days since the way web pages are built is very different from the old "run it through imageready and do it in tables" days.

*edit*
Some more potentially useful links:

http://www.richmondcomputes.org/gimp_image_slicing
http://www.linux-magazine.com/w3/issue/59/Web_Design_with_Gimp.pdf
http://my.opera.com/area42/blog/gimp-save-for-web-plugin-0-28-4

Hi Pertubatio,

Ah that is just awesome, and i can import from PDF. Perturbatio you are a star for that find.

Just to add on more to the question, I know the table days are gone and its all CSS now, is there a tool that does something similar to the chopping tool but drops out a CSS which defines the regions of the rulers to be used for HTML.

That would be nifty.

A

Do you have access to Photoshop?

If so, you can use Slices to do this. Load the image, define the slices, Save for web, click the regions you want to save, and that's it.

No magic buttons, though. Just the regular sort. ;)

The only way to do it properly is by hand. ALl an automates system can do is slice it and put it into tables or DIVS in a grid layout.