madd@world.std.com (jim frost) (01/04/90)
Xloadimage patchlevel 03 is now available. If you don't know what xloadimage is, read the summary below; you might find it useful. WHAT'S CHANGED? If you have patchlevel 02 or earlier (that's what's in R4 contrib), the new version is considerably better. Color management is drastically improved, both in a window and when loading images onto the root window. RGB image merging now works correctly and there are bug fixes to both dithering algorithms as well as the colormap reduction code. The window display code has been improved to work well with naive window managers. There are minor bug fixes all over the place. Most importantly there is now support for loading GIF images. The patch itself is a little more than half of the size of the complete distribution, so if you have patchlevel 01 you might as well get the whole distribution instead of the two patches. WHERE TO GET IT There are three ways to get the newer version. A patch should be going out on comp.windows.x in the near future. There were two previous postings, one the full patchlevel 01 distribution and the other a patch to bring it up to 02. If you have internet access, you can anonymous ftp the source from expo.lcs.mit.edu. It's in /contrib/xloadimage.1.03.tar.Z. If you cannot get source from either comp.sources.x or anonymous ftp, I can email it to you directly -- either as a patch or as the complete source directory -- at the address below. Please consider email to be a last resort. If you have to have it emailed, please specify whether you want the patch or full source directory. SUMMARY OF XLOADIMAGE CAPABILITIES For those of you who haven't seen it, xloadimage is kind of like xim, xgif, and xsetroot combined. It can display Faces Project, GIF, Sun Rasterfile, PBM, XPM, and X bitmap image formats (automatically recognizing each and whether or not it's in "compress" format). Since there are a lot of color images out there but a lot of monochrome displays, xloadimage can dither images, automatically if necessary. Since there are a lot of small-depth servers (eg 386/ix's 2 and 4 plane servers), it can reduce the colormap size of images to fit the display, automatically if necessary. Since images might be too dark or too bright, it can adjust them accordingly. It can also zoom images along the X, Y, or both axes, allowing for aspect ratio correction, and has a few other simple image processing functions. But the functionality that most people like it for is the root-window loading capability. It can load images onto the root window -- even color images. Xloadimage should work out-of-the-box on any server that supports at least one of StaticGray, GrayScale, StaticColor, or PseudoColor visuals. This includes almost all of the common servers out there today, including the 386 servers which break most X programs. It is extremely portable, so even if it doesn't work out-of-the-box you should be able to make it work in minutes (ie there might be header file conflicts on really strange machines). If you have questions or cannot get xloadimage from expo or the comp.sources.x archives, feel free to write to me at the address below. Enjoy, jim frost saber software jimf@saber.com