Fitting an Image to its Frame

This article is part of the Scripts series.

We have some built-in functions in Scribus to Adjust Image to Frame, and also Adjust Frame to Image. What if you have a situation where you have a frame of a set size, and must fill it, even though you end up cropping the edge a bit? It's certainly possible to do, but a bit fiddly.

Here is a script that will make sure an image fills either the height or width, by your choice. It does this by temporarily expanding the frame, calling setScaleImageToFrame to say to scale to the frame, then immediately calls the function again to say don't scale to the frame. After this, the frame is returned to its original dimensions, and since its in Free Scaling mode, the image scale stays the same.

This may be hard to understand verbally, but will be obvious once you run the script. If you make a mistake in the direction, just run the script again.

fitimage2frame.py

#!/usr/bin/env python
# -*- coding: utf-8  -*-

# ****************************************************************************
#  This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify 
#  it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
#  the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or
#  (at your option) any later version.
#
#  This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
#  but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
#  MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  See the
#  GNU General Public License for more details.
#
#  You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License
#  along with this program; if not, write to the Free Software
#  Foundation, Inc., 59 Temple Place - Suite 330, Boston, MA 02111-1307, USA.
# 
# ****************************************************************************


"""

© 2015 Gregory Pittman

fitimage2frame.py

USAGE

After selecting an image frame with image loaded, run script.
There is one dialog to choose whether to fit to Height (default) or width. Note that typing in anything
other than Height will fit to width.
It doesn't matter if you have or haven't selected Adjust Image to Frame prior to running the script.

"""

try:
    import scribus
except ImportError:
    print "Unable to import the 'scribus' module. This script will only run within"
    print "the Python interpreter embedded in Scribus. Try Script->Execute Script."
    sys.exit(1)


if scribus.selectionCount() != 1:
    scribus.messageBox('Selection Count', "You must have a frame selected",
                       scribus.ICON_WARNING, scribus.BUTTON_OK)
    sys.exit(2)

frame1 = scribus.getSelectedObject()

ftype1 = scribus.getObjectType(frame1)
if (ftype1 != "ImageFrame"):
    scribus.messageBox('Object Type', "Selected object must be an image frame",
                       scribus.ICON_WARNING, scribus.BUTTON_OK)
    sys.exit(2)

fitwhich = scribus.valueDialog("Fit to Height?",'Change to anything else to fit to width',"Height")

scribus.setRedraw(False)
frameW, frameH = scribus.getSize(frame1)

if (fitwhich == "Height"):
    scribus.sizeObject(frameW*3, frameH, frame1)
    scribus.setScaleImageToFrame(1,1,frame1)
    scribus.setScaleImageToFrame(0,1,frame1)
    scribus.sizeObject(frameW, frameH, frame1)

else:
    scribus.sizeObject(frameW, frameH*3, frame1)
    scribus.setScaleImageToFrame(1,1,frame1)
    scribus.setScaleImageToFrame(0,1,frame1)
    scribus.sizeObject(frameW, frameH, frame1)

scribus.setRedraw(True)

Notes

After the script runs, you will see that the X-Pos, Y-Pos of the image is at the left upper corner of the frame, so you may want to move in the appropriate direction to best show the part of the image you wish to display.

You could change the valueDialog so it uses "Yes" for the correct reponse, but I like the visual reminder of what the default is. I'm also lazy, so I don't want to have to carefully spell "Width" or "width", then write the logic to cover errors. There only two choices here, either the default, or something else, in this case width. You can just delete the default to get the same result.