Re: [Texmacs-dev] Image library

[Felix Breuer]

On Mon, 27 Jun 2005 09:38:23 +0200
Joris van der Hoeven <address@hidden> wrote:

> Hi again,
> 
> Someone can recommend me a standard image library for speeding up
> the rendering of images inside TeXmacs (i.e. to be used instead of
> ghostscript for all formats except for Postscript).

I am no expert on this topic, but two libraries come to mind:

  * ImageMagick http://www.imagemagick.org
  * Imlib and Imlib2 

The former is more feature-rich and "the standard". The latter are more
light-weight and faster.

ImageMagick is probably most likely to be installed by default on a
Linux system. However, that is not a "matter of course", because some
consider it bloated. Both ImageMagick and Imlib would introduce
additional dependencies, that cannot be expected to be statisfied on
any system. But that is no show-stopper in my oppinion. Just go with
what appeals most to you.


A propos, you may also want to look at 

  * http://www.antigrain.com/ (more exotic)
  * http://www.cairographics.org/

Cairo is not a bitmap, but a vector graphics lib. It is also unstable
ATM. But it the Hot Topic (TM) among the X Windows and Gnome people,
so maybe something to keep an eye on.



A while back you mentioned something about TeXmacs and OpenGL. That
comment made me very curious. Is I didn't ask then, I'll ask now:
what are/were your plans in that direction?

I, for one, would welcome a TeXmacs<->OpenGL interface that works both
ways: It would be great to use the TeXmacs engine to render text/formulas
in an OpenGL application...


Regards,
Felix