Sidik,
I know the image display hackery done for astronomy well: I used to write
this code myself (at SAO, in the OIR group, for some of the early CCD
systems) before I started hacking window systems. So I can comment on
this on both sides of the issue: as window system designer and former astronomy
hacker.
A large part of why pseudocolor exists in X was to support such applications
on the 1 mip class machines of the late 1980's, where displays were often
over 2 megabyte/second busses (with a tailwind). But that is now over a decade
in the past. We knew then (or at least I did) that pseudocolor was evil and
would eventually go away, but accepted it as certain apps, such as those
used by astronomers and for other imaging applications, were not possible
without it on that class hardware.
Thankfully, that hardware is now hardware of the (long) past....
Any computer system with PCI class display hardware is fast enough
to emulate colormap tricks in completely in software that should be adequate
for interactive, real time contrast enhancement/display trickery
completely on the client side, particularly using
the shared memory extension.
I also know that most astronomers have access to most of their source code, and
it is, I believe, the right thing in your case to rewrite the app,
since hardware even capable of pseudocolor at all is becoming hard to come by.
This doesn't handle the case of what to do when source is not available.
I'll comment on the general discussions separately.
- Jim
--
Jim Gettys
Cambridge Research Laboratory
Compaq Computer Corporation
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
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