README

= Acrylic -- Photoshop for <s>cool people</s> dorky programmers

Acrylic is a collection of tools for generating images with Ruby code. It is
built on top of Cairo, and depends on the Ruby Cairo bindings available from
the Ruby-GNOME2[http://ruby-gnome2.sourceforge.jp/] project.

In order to use Acrylic effectively, you will need to understand the basic
concepts of the Cairo API. This information can be found in the tutorial on
the Cairo[http://cairographics.org/documentation/] website.

Features of Acrylic:

* Path Management

   Images can be generated directly in the Rails /public/images directory.

* Preview

   View your work in progress just by running the file.

* Vector Tools

   Margins, Shapes, and a model for Spline Continuity.

* Raster Tools

   Layers, Gaussian Blur, Noise, Downsampling, Bump Maps, and Shadows.

* Text Tools

   Wrapping, Centering, Measuring, and Circular Text.

* Tools for Managing Sets of Images

   Suites, Variants, and Templates.

* Border Generator

   Automatically slices images and generates CSS for custom borders.

* A Simple Color library

  HSL and RGB with an implicit Alpha channel.

These features augment an already a very capable vector graphics library. Cairo
was chosen because of it has a clean, well-designed API, and is actively maintained.

== Philosophy

Every feature of Acrylic was written to help generate some specific image. Every image
I create is a learning experience. This library is the cumulative effect of what I've
learned so far. As my technique has improved, the shape of the library has changed
considerably. It is still very lightweight, and I find it very easy to adapt it as I
need to.

== License

Acrylic is released under the MIT license.

== Author

Acrylic was created, and is maintained, by Austin Taylor. Austin is a freelance Ruby
and Rails developer in Apex, NC.