Diagram/Chart Performance (21259)
2021 Converted Icons (19216)
FH supplies "flag icons" for the "UN states" in the emf format preferred by FH.V7. These can be used as icons on diagrams to indicate nationality, residence etc.David2416 wrote: ↑07 Dec 2022 11:43 Hi all,
I recently found my diagrams and charts were taking much longer to load than previously. A little investigation showed the issue was with a couple of Country Flags I had created. I found that their size was over 320,000kb! Other Country Flags are in the range 1kb to 675kb. Regenerating these new flags to more reasonable size of around 250kb vastly improved the performance.
The Country Flags were created using IrfanView version 4.60 and were saved as .emf files.
I hope this tip may be of use to others.
In the Knowledge Base there are downloadable icon sets including:
- Country Flag Census Icons (EMF)
- Numbered Census Icons in EMF format for England, Ireland, Scotland, Wales, Isle of Man, USA and Canada ( and a set X for NOT in )
Non GB&I users may well want flags for US states etc.
Issues:ColeValleyGirl wrote: ↑07 Dec 2022 15:58 David,
Open a topic in Maintaining the KB?
I'd be grateful if somebody other than me would handle most of the work... I certainly am not skilled enough to do the image conversion (especially bearing in mind the issues identified here re transparent backgrounds: 2021 Converted Icons (19216))
- Where to get them
- Wikipedia has public domain county flags e.g. England Counties
- Others may already have suitable sets - if so, please come forward!
- Getting them into the preferred format:
- emf format
- with transparent backgrounds - although if an image of a rectangular flag is properly clipped there should be no "background" to worry about. "Fluttering flags" are probably inappropriate for images that are only ever going to be icons.
- and with minimised size.*
- Collating them and zipping them up into sensible downloadable "icon sets"
I can do a certain amount of collating - I could take on collating GB&I counties/provinces/countries, but am nervous about the work involved in getting them into emf format (plus at the moment being on V6, bmp files are of more interest to me. In addition getting them into the emf format which is a Microsoft proprietary format may be sub-optimum on my linux machine).
So replies please:
- If you already have suitable public domain sets of flags beyond the Nation-State flags already available
- If you can advise about suitable maximum file size for emf icon files
- a convenient means to convert other formats to emf - preferably in batch. I suspect that GIMP (GNU Image Manipulation Program - linux developers have warped naming practices!) has add-ins that would do this, but does anyone already know of a suitable program/process?
- if you need or are willing to collate sets of flags (e.g. US States)