Athletics Certificate Generator: General Use Version


In first few versions of the certificate, headings and labels were embedded in the templated background image for the certificates. Powershell then accurately positioned drawstrings to include the competitor’s name below Name label in the image. The same was done for Distance and Time. I this later version, all text was removed from background image and is generated by drawstrings generated from data by Powershell scripts

Changes — 19 September 2026

Summary of today’s session on the Aberfeldie Masters Athletics certificate generator.

Repository

Certificate text moved from image to scripts

  • Heading
  • SubHeading
  • Host
  • Date

Name, Distance and Time Labels had been previously moved.

See CertificateTemplate.png

All text that was previously baked into the certificate template image is now drawn by the scripts. CertificateTemplate.png is now pure artwork (frame, singlet, logo) and CertificateTemplateorig.png is kept untouched as the unmodified master.

Name Text Font Size Y
Title 1 HOUR TRACK RUN Times New Roman Bold 77 px 70
SubTitle Moonee Valley Athletics Centre Arial Narrow 51 px 180
Host Aberfeldie Masters Athletics Times New Roman Italic 38 px 247
Date 16 September 2026 Arial Narrow 34 px 312

These definitions live in CertificateText.ps1, which both GenerateCertificates.ps1 and GenerateCertificatesTIME.ps1 dot-source — so the event wording only needs editing in one place. Each line is drawn centred at its natural width.

The same was done earlier for the field labels: the standard script draws Name/Distance labels above their values, and the TIME script draws Name/Distance/Time label-and-value groups.

Matching the baked fonts

A PNG stores only pixels — there is no font metadata to recover, so the fonts had to be identified by measurement and eyeball:

  1. Measure the baked glyphs. Each text line’s bounding box was found by scanning the image for the navy text colour, giving the exact pixel width, height and centre of every line.
  2. Compare candidates by width. Graphics.MeasureString() was run over likely fonts (Times New Roman, Georgia, Cambria, Garamond, Arial Narrow, etc.) at a known size; the measured width was then scaled to the baked width to estimate the real font size.
  3. Compare letterforms visually. Candidate fonts were rendered side-by-side with the original strip and matched by shape — this is how Arial Narrow (subtitle, date) and Times New Roman italic (host line) were identified.
  4. Condensation. The baked text is narrower than the same font at the same height would naturally render — it was horizontally compressed when the artwork was created. An initial implementation replicated this with Graphics.ScaleTransform, but that was dropped in favour of simply sizing each font so its natural width matches — since every line is centred anyway, the squeeze bought nothing but complexity.
  5. DPI pitfall. The template is 192 DPI, so a point-based font renders twice as large as expected. All drawn text uses GraphicsUnit.Pixel to avoid the unit conversion entirely.

The result is visually near-identical to the baked version, but the wording, fonts and positions are now all script-controlled — which is what makes the package reusable for a different event.

Other changes

  • Startup email-mode check — each script scans its own source to detect whether $Mail.Save() and/or $Mail.Send() are enabled: both enabled aborts with an error popup; send-only requires confirmation; save-only proceeds silently; neither warns that no emails will be produced.
  • Sending account resolution — $SendUsingAccount is resolved once at startup; if the account isn’t in the Outlook profile a warning is shown and the default account is used, instead of silently assigning null. Applied at every mail site, including the certificate branch of GenerateCertificates.ps1 which previously never set it.
  • clean.ps1 rework — empties Output\*, Results\*, logs\*, removes ~$*.xlsx lock files and the stray ,\ folder, while keeping the tracked sample 004-Fred Nurk.png and leaving the folder structure in place. -WhatIf previews without deleting.
  • Outlook requirements documented — classic desktop Outlook with a default mail profile is required; the “New Outlook” app does not support COM automation.
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