AutoHotkey Community

ROD-Ex is a script that demonstrates automation of


• Adding resources to AutoHotkeySC.bin
  
• Creating a Resource only DLL from scratch

As of now, the script handles ICON and BITMAP resources. The rest may be absorbed into as RCDATA :

Create a subfolder named Resource in your project folder and place your resources in it. Place ROD-Ex.ahk into Script's folder and run it.
Either AutoHokeySC.bin or Resource.dll will be placed/created in the script's folder and will be updated with the resources.


Download : ROD-Ex (10.09 KiB)
The above script has a wrapper dependency : FileIO16.ahk (1.92 KiB)

Useful information on how to refer resources stored inside PE : Embed images in compiled AutoHotkey scripts?
You might be interested in ResHacker a fine tool to view/manipulate resources.

MSDN:
Resources Functions : http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/librar ... 85%29.aspx
Resource File Formats : http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/librar ... 85%29.aspx
Resource Types : http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/librar ... 85%29.aspx
Icons in Win32 : http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms997538.aspx

Edit: The previous < 45 line code is here: ROD-45L.ahk

Pish, a real hacker would have done it without creating a temporary file. Just kidding, very impressive.

(on the serious side... can we have something like MemoryLoadLibrary() built-in to AHK?)

That is not a temporary, but the resultant file. I do not see any meaning in creating a resource file in memory and not write it back to disk.
For record: empty.dll ( 2560 bytes ) was created in RosAsm ( only DllMain ) with ASM source stripped off to save some bytes. Have avoided the dependency by including the DLL as a compressed 1480 byte function.

Do you plan to develop this any further?

A few things I have learned:

• Named resources aren't worth the trouble:
  
  • UpdateResource will succeed with lower-case resource names, but you can't reference the resources unless the names are upper-case. (Names seem to be case-insensitive when referencing existing resources.)
  • UpdateResource seems to clip the last character of the resource name. Consistently on XP and Vista, if I pass "NAME", it uses "NAM", so I instead pass "NAME." expecting the "." to be discarded. (I hope I am doing something wrong, but that seems unlikely given that the lpName parameter is a simple null-terminated string.)
• Internet Explorer controls and ShowHtmlDialog seem able to read images regardless of the resource type. I've tried bmp, png, jpg and gif, with success.
• Bitmap resources (RT_BITMAP=2) are in the same format as .bmp files, excluding the BITMAPFILEHEADER. In other words, discard the first 14 bytes.
• Icon resources are a little trickier. Icons in Win32 explains the ICO format in addition to the RT_GROUP_ICON and RT_ICON resource formats.

I also have a custom build of Ahk2Exe which allows a custom bin file to be specified on the command line. I'll upload it if you're interested. (UpdateResource may be applied to AutoHotkeySC.bin the same way it is applied to a resource DLL.)

Highly resourceful. Thanks. Most of my success with resources came with brute-force methods.



I had wished as follows:



I am thinking in following lines:
The user will have to code the script with resource building in the begining part:



resource.ahk will be the standard library that should take care of :

1) either creating a empty resource.dll in a_scriptdir
or copy autohotkeysc.bin to a_scriptdir
2) add / modify / delete resources as user specification
3) create a project.ini in a_scriptdir so that these lib functions do not get triggered on every run ( Resource_BeginUpdate() would hash check the source files to see if an update is required )
4) the project.ini or ( whatever name ) would also be stored as RCDATA resource.
5) there should be no dllcalls for the user ( atleast for the data retrieval part ) .. but only resource_*() functions that would help to fetch data with single line.
6) the user would not be dealing with any numbers.. but only filenames and or aliases. the library would take care of assigning numbers
7) the above would be made possible because resource_*() functions would be referring project.ini stored inside the PE

support for minimum: ICON,BITMAP,VERSION,RCDATA.

What I wonder is:
How to delete the lines between ( and including ) Resource_BeginUpdate() / Resource_EndUpdate() before the script is passed to ahk2exe ?
Resource_BeginUpdate() could check A_IsCompiled and play dead.. but still it will be unneccessary code inside a compiled script.
maybe a new directive that would automatically comment out / ignore a block of commands ( only if A_IsCompiled is true )



sure ... sure.



I am aware of.. but
1) I do not compile my scripts. 2) It did not interest me much because my wish was not considered..
but I am very much interested now, because you can make things happen.

Ahk2Exe_L.zip
Ahk2Exe_L_src.zip
It should be put in the Compiler directory to support function libraries, but you may rename it to coexist with the original Ahk2Exe.
Why not use a separate resource script?
That could be done with pre-processing. See for example AHK preprocessor.
Nor do I, which is why I put a higher priority on finishing my other projects.

I also realised it is possible to extract FileInstall'd files; AutoHotkey itself may simply call FileExtractToMem, which is normally only used to load the script. I think it seems more appropriate to natively support "resources" embedded using FileInstall.

On the other hand, native support for PE resources (perhaps similar to the res protocol) could be used by compiled or uncompiled scripts, with resource DLLs, script-embedded resources or both.

There would probably be a lot of code overlap, so it would be worth supporting both.

Thanks Lexikos.

I will reply after trying it out, but may I know the parameter, please.



Edit: Oh! Okay.. it is in readme.txt along with source.

Dear Lexikos,



I am still interested!.. though I have to learn/work a lot more ..
Thanks for the tip on RT_BITMAP. I have implemented it and also RT_ICON/RT_GROUP_ICON

The title post has been updated.

Regards,

Be warned that my custom build of Ahk2Exe does not support the /NoDecompile option. As far as I can tell, it is not implemented in the downloadable Ahk2Exe source.

OH!..

I can somewhat understand the concern of Mr.Chris

Did you try my script Lexikos ?

I need some info. I found how to obtain hFont from raw TTF bytestream. It works fine with WM_SETFONT on AHK control.

You have already shown how to refer images from HTML .. but how to use an embedded font .. i.e., use it from HTML ?

I did not try, but my best guess is that WM_SETFONT would not work on an IE control.

Did you try font embedding with the res-protocol yet?

you've done it finally !
i didn't tried it yet but i believe that i'll need it someday when i making gui scripts for public
though it's resource only, non-programmers can make dlls now.
how sweet it is thanks for sharing SKAN!

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er.. can you repeat the link, please.



Right now IconEx deals only with resource-icons.., I need to make it read .ICO files too. When done, this script would be built into IconEx

.eot/WEFT (embedded open type), and res protocol (don't know if this works)

could i use your work in compile_ahk to manual add resources to a script when it is compiled? a reference to you in the credits would be obvious