Re: (Pathetic cry for FAQ help) Re: ZoomRaster movies

[Jan Kreft]

Hi everyone,

just reading the movie thread...

Including info on movie making in the FAQ is certainly a good idea since
the Readme is only useful if you know it exists and where, which is the
problem with much of the documentation. 

With the old version of Swarm, I made all the changes Nelson made
available and then got empty pixmaps. That made me realize that Gecko did
the drawing stuff by itself because Swarm wouldn't draw circles. Marcus
then suggested an easy solution, namely calling

        XpmWriteFileFromPixmap(display, fileName, pm, 0, NULL);

in Raster or some subclass.

I haven't tested this with the new release but assume this would still
work in an Unix environment. But of course not under Windows, right?

Then a while ago, there was this thread about including drawing routines
in Swarm-next-release. I understood all Marcus' mails in that thread to
imply that drawing circles, rectangles, lines, filled or otherwise, would
be part of the next standard Swarm release. Is that so?

I also assumed that in that case writing a pixmap to file would be easy to
implement in a proper way in Swarm-1.2, independent of OS and not
requiring patching every new release of Gecko and Swarm. Gecko's drawing
routines could be outsourced to Swarm, too. At least, that was what I was
hoping for. 

FWIW, animated gifs can be made with a simple command line tool called
gifmerge under Linux. gifmerge doesn't do anything else, but it's easy to
use:

gifmerge -<delayIn10msecUnits> *.gif > anim.gif

If you have Xanim, giftrans or such tools anyway, you'll likely have
gifmerge as well.

Cheers,

Jan.

On Wed, 13 May 1998, Benedikt Stefansson wrote:

> Hi Paul,
> 
> I didn't want to toot my horn here, since I thought it was obvious from
> looking at the web site...but if you download the BatchRaster stuff that I
> based on Nelson's ZoomRaster the README there should give you an answer to
> most of your questions.
> 
> I'm sorry that I'm so lazy, but right now I don't feel like writing a FAQ,
> so I hope someone else jumps in.
> 
> Also, w.r.t. to someone's question earlier - about the best way to make
> animations; on Unix use ImageMagic to make animated gifs and then put those
> in a web page, you can streamline this with a Perl script fairly easily.
> Other idea is to use xanim that can play a series of gifs, but then you
> need to keep all of them around (both can also use PPM but since the format
> that ZoomRaster and BatchRaster write out is very large, should transform
> to gif right away which is neato binary and light).
> 
> There are some alternatives to ImageMagic for those darn Windoze computers
> that everyone seems to be so much in love with but I wouldn't know.
> 
> 
> --
> With best regards,
> -Benedikt


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