[Plplot-devel] x20c.c

[Alan W. I. <ir...@be...>]

I have a suggestion.  Why not add a function to this demo to input various
image formats and extract the information required by plimage? Right now,
there is rudimentary support for reading ppm images from x20c.c, and I
suggest replacing this with the appropriate calls to libpbm, libpgm, libpnm,
or libppm.  I have never used those free libraries directly, but the license
(as interpreted by the Debian copyright notice) puts no restrictions
whatsoever on our code, and it is the library used by the huge number of
linux image converters.  Also, use of these libraries (which come with the
netpbm package, see http://netpbm.sourceforge.net/netpbm.html#lbAM) means
you have direct read access to pbm, pgm, pnm, or ppm images from your C
code. Furthermore, from the C code you could invoke the the free image
converter with the system command that was appropriate (e.g., pngtopnm,
jpegtopnm, tifftopnm, pstopnm, and many more or indeed anytopnm which is a
superset of all of them) to convert a given format to pnm which can then be
read into x20c using libpnm.

If there are no objections to this way to have access to many different
image formats, I am willing to give this a try.

Alan


email: ir...@be...
phone: 250-727-2902	FAX: 250-721-7715
snail-mail:
Dr. Alan W. Irwin
Department of Physics and Astronomy,
University of Victoria, P.O. Box 3055,
Victoria, British Columbia, Canada, V8W 3P6
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Linux-powered astrophysics
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