Re: merging imread and imwrite

[John W. Eaton]

On 31-Jan-2008, Thomas Treichl wrote:

| If eg. the libpng, libtiff and libjpeg libraries could be used directly then 
I 
| think this would be a great thing because they are very small and can be 
build 
| easily (are there any other famous pixel formats, eg. like .bmp on Windows? 
On a 
| Mac I noticed that most apps do want a .tiff format). For Gnuplot.app I need 
to 
| compile gdlib - it seems to be a layer above png, jpeg and others but I 
actually 
| can't tell any details about it...

I haven't looked, but I would bet that a problem with using the
individual libraries directly is that you have to use N different ways
of calling the read functions for N different image formats.  It would
be nice if someone had already done the work to package these things
up in a simple interface.

Has anyone looked at DevIL (http://openil.sourceforge.net)?  It is
LGPL and there are Debian packages and apparently RPM files and a
Windows build.  What about the licenses of the dependencies?  They
must also be GPL compatible.

It also seems to have functions available for displaying images with
OpenGL, which I assume would fit nicely with the new graphics
features.

jwe