From: Joe Van Dyk <joevandyk@...>
Date: 2005-09-09T01:24:04+09:00
Subject: Re: RMagick Thumbnailing Question

On 9/8/05, Raymond Brigleb <ray@needmoredesigns.com> wrote:
<snip> 
> I'm writing an application (in Rails) that uses much of RMagick's...
> magic. Thumbnails are a big part of the job, but I'm having
> difficulty getting my head around the Geometry (?) class... in a
> sense, what I'm trying to do is create thumbnails that "fill the
> space" rather than are "restricted to the space" they're in. Meaning,
> if I say I want 100x100 thumbnails, I want it to first resize, then
> actually crop a 300x100 image to the middle 100 pixels. Make any
> sense? I just think they'll look better that way.
> 
> My question is, has anybody done this? I've seen it in Backpack
> (backpackhq.com) which I'm just guessing uses this library. I'm
> wondering if anybody has any helpful tips or perhaps some code they
> could share with me.

http://studio.imagemagick.org/RMagick/doc/struct.html#Geometry

Check out the flags at the bottom.  In particular, the '!' flag.

What you probably want is 100!x100! or something similar.