Developed and tested on Linux. Its a shell script that requires the Android SDK to be installed with the tools directory in the PATH variable.

###INTRO

Android Binary Resource Compiler (abrc). This is a command-line script to compile resources such as NinePatch PNGs and layout XML files to Android binary format. The compiled resources named in the command are extracted and saved out into a separate location. This script was developed as an alternative to using Eclipse and "unzip" to compile and extract NinePatch PNGs during the creation of custom Android UI themes.

###USAGE abrc usage abrc help abrc [options] compile ... abrc [options] setup

###OPTIONS:

-v Enable verbose output -o Overwrite files without prompting

###COMPILE

The compile operation compiles the resources in the location. This can be any Android Eclipse project directory which contains the resources you wish to compile and extract. You can also use this script's "setup" syntax to create a minimal project without using Eclipse. See the SETUP section below for more information.

The named resource files , etc., are then extracted into the . Parent path components in the resource file names are preserved and also determine the extracted location within the output directory.

###Example:

Consider the following path in "MyProject" which contains, among other things, the statusbar_background.9.png file. This file is in the format created by draw9patch program.

MyProject/res/drawable-mdpi/statusbar_background.9.png

The following command compiles the resources in MyProject and writes the output to the MyTheme/framework-res directory using the leading path components of the specified resource file(s). I.e., In this example the resulting output file is MyTheme/framework-res/res/drawable-mdpi/statusbar_background.9.png

abrc compile MyProject MyTheme/framework-res res/drawable-mdpi/statusbar_background.9.png

###SETUP

The setup operation is completely optional. It creates a minimal project skeleton for compiling resources. Eclipse projects can also be used in the compile step above.

abrc setup MyProject The above command creates the following directory structure/files:

MyProject/res/drawable MyProject/res/drawable-mdpi MyProject/res/drawable-hdpi MyProject/res/layout MyProject/AndroidManifest.xml Copy your resources into the appropriate location within the project and then use the compile operation to compile and extract the binary files.