Re: [Texmacs-dev] Image library

[Joris van der Hoeven]

On Mon, Jun 27, 2005 at 11:55:04AM +0000, Felix Breuer wrote:
> > 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.

I wrote an internal plug-in for Imlib2.

I also lost one afternoon on ImageMagick yesterday;
its rendering scheme is to X-unfriendly: although there is
internal support for conversion to X images and rendering them,
nothing of this is available at the user level. One may render
in a pixel-by-pixel manner, but this is way too slow.
Unfortunately, Imlib2 has no support for animated gifs.

> A propos, you may also want to look at 
> 
>   * http://www.antigrain.com/ (more exotic)
>   * http://www.cairographics.org/

Henri told me about Cairo. Antigrain looks nice too.
At a certain point, it would be good to replace all rendering
inside TeXmacs by a library like this one. This should be
fairly easy, because we already have an abstract "ps_device" and
we always use shadows before rendering. It would suffice to
replace the shadow by a buffer from another library and
write fast routines for displaying them to X Drawables
(if not already supported by the library).

Thanks for the pointers, Joris