Border Dicer

Load a Border Image

This tool works with images that are on your computer, not online images. Browse your computer for an image and click the Load button. The image will appear in the workspace below, with guidelines overlaid.

Mark your Image

On the workspace below, drag the flags to move the guidelines. The lines mark where the image will be diced. There is no need to position lines at the edges of the image, as the image edges are automatically taken into account. If the flag text is red on gray, it is on or beyond the edge of the image and will be ignored. A guideline marks the left or top of the segment, and the segment above or to the left will end on the pixel before the line.

In the standard format, there are 4 full-length guidelines that will cut the image into 9 segments. This format will work with most standard borders with consistent edges. The 8 cells around the perimeter will be created and the center will be ignored.

Shorter pairs of dashed lines are used to outline background flex sections. These don't actually dice up the border; they just make extra copies of sections to be used as backgrounds on the sides. Because they don't dice through the image like standard guidelines, they can cross over the long guidelines, and will ignore crossing other dashed lines. The normal side segments will be centered on each side as foreground images, with the flex segments behind.

Double-clicking a flag will turn a dashed line off or on. Since dashed lines are processed as pairs, if one is off, it's mate will also be ignored. Using this mode and turning off any guidelines will require hand-coding the template.

With the largest setting, up to 16 segments can be created around the perimeter. The center segment on each side will be treated as a background flex tile for that side. At least one full length horizontal line and one full length vertical line must be used. The shorter lines will not cut into each other, and should thus, not be used to create corners, tiles, or notches that are closer to the perimeter than the longer guidelines. Double-click a flag to turn a short line off or on to decrease the number of segments. Using this mode and turning off guidelines will require hand-coding the template.

Process the slices

Click the "Process Codes" button when the guidelines are in place. This step can be repeated if you need to move a line. When the image is processed, two codes will be created. The DOS file will run free IrfanView to slice up the images, and the HTML file can be used afterwards to view the segments in a template.

Run IrfanView from a DOS batch file

To save the DOS file, open Notepad or create an empty notepad text file. Paste the contents of the Dos Batch File window into notepad and save the file to something that will represent this particular border. (You will create a separate batch file for each border.) Be sure the file type is set to ANSI, as that is the only acceptable type for DOS. Change the file suffix to .BAT so that Windows will recognize it as an executable DOS file.

After you have finished creating that file, you can click it to run the program in a black DOS window. In most cases, it should run normally, but if IrfanView is not in the expected directory, or if any other files have moved since creation of the batch file, you may encounter an error. The DOS file can be edited in Notepad to correct the Irfanview directory if necessary.

View the slices in an HTML template

Once the segments have been generated, the Preview button on the HTML code window can be used to test the segments in a template. The template code can also be saved in Notepad with a file extension of .HTM so that the browser will recognize it as web code. The code in the template is going to point to the image segments on your computer. After uploading the segments to your website or to an image host, the paths in the sample code should be changed to point to the online images.