Hello folks, I'm back once again with my rather extreme requirements, as usual...
This time, here is the situation: I have roughly 100 very large grayscale images (up to 600M pixels each) that I need to distribute to some investors/clients on CD for their use in evaluating engineering projects that I have proposed. Using various compression techniques, I can successfully fit these images onto one CD, along with all of the other information that I need to send out. I will be providing copies of the same CD to multiple prospective clients for their evaluation. But, I have several problems: 1. I need a viewing and printing application that can work with very large TIFF images, which can also be distributed freely to my clients on the same CD. 2. Preferably this application should require little or nothing in the way of installation. 3. Most of these clients are almost certainly running computers with much less RAM and configured with much less virtual memory than it would take to load these images into memory for viewing. So, a viewing application that requires completely loading the image into memory for viewing would almost certainly be completely out of the question. 4. All of these clients are independent shops from my own, and will be running Windows. I can't ask them to switch or to install some Linux or Unix variant just to view my images. 5. The application must be able to print extremely large images. Since most printers have very limited page sizes compared to the size of these images, the application must either support tiling the image to multiple pages (preferably), or allow a specific portion of the image to be printed. Whew, some list of requirements, huh???!!! Here are some applications that I have already considered and rejected: 1. Commercial applications for viewing and printing well logs, including NeuraView, Riley MVP, and MJ LogSleuth. Rejected because these applications cannot be freely distributed, and licensing them would be prohibitively expensive for simply viewing my project propsals. The cheapest of these applications is around $500. 2. The GIMP. Requires loading the entire image into memory, and though not as memory intensive as ImageMagick for grayscale images, would still likely make my customers machines croak. Also, the GIMP has no ability to tile images for printing (at least not under Windows). 3. The ImageMagick viewer application. Requires loading the entire image into memory for viewing. At a minimum of 5 bytes per pixel, this would definitely make my clients' machines croak (hell, it even makes MY machine croak!). Unsure of printing capabilities, but it doesn't really matter. 4. Microsoft/Wang/Kodak Imaging. Can actually view the images ok, though the scrollbars act weird when you go beyond 32K pixels on either axis. Has no concept of tiled printing. 5. nip-7.8.5 Disk based image viewing and editing application, can easily work with large images and limited RAM. Requires no significant installation. However, the user interface is a little strange, and more importantly it doesn't have any of its own printing abilities as far as I can tell. So, any other ideas out there? As usual, I'm desperate! All suggestions greatly appreciated. Thanks in advance for any help. s/KAM _______________________________________________ Gimp-user mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.xcf.berkeley.edu/mailman/listinfo/gimp-user
