On Apr 20, 2010, at 1:02 PM, Tom Browder wrote: > Too, bad. And my old company mail is gone, too. I looked through the > mail you pointed to searching for a thread I posted some years ago > proposing a new pix file format. I was reminded of that during our > discussions of rt and rtedge.
I found this in the current brlcad-devel archives: https://sourceforge.net/mailarchive/message.php? msg_id=F4AAE2E381F0624BB8F513C1E9880FB93CDCA1% 40newman.fwb.internal.srs.com > In the middle of that posting thread I suggested a desire for a > multi-threaded version of rt and rtedge that could write to a file for > my scripted processes. Hm, they are multithreaded now though rtedge is pretty bad at it. > The proposed pix format essentially had a header similar to png (or > similar graphics files) which defines the number of rows and colums > pixel-wise (and the pixel depth). In the process of generating the > new pix files my wish was for the output to be already trimmed of > excess white space so that the result would normally be a rectangle > instead of a square. All the plot handling utilities could read the > file and the user wouldn't have to manually enter the -w and -h (or > similar) options. Sounds a lot like the NETPBM file formats (ppm (color), pgm (grayscale), pbm (bitmaps), pnm). Having an option to automatically trim background excess from output images would make a nice addition to the tracers (maybe something like a padding option). There's philosophical reasons why pix/bw don't have a header, though. The direction we're moving towards is so that you can specify any file format (e.g., rt -o file.png file.g object) and have the file type be inferred automatically allowing you to pick a file format that has dimensions embedded. Some of the tools already support this feature to a limited extent. Cheers! Sean ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ _______________________________________________ BRL-CAD Developer mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/brlcad-devel
