paul: README

For some special purposes I wrote a kind of an image viewer named

   paul = _P_rogram zur _A_uswertung und _U_mwandlung von _L_aserbildern

(for non German speakers: Program to evaluate and convert laser images).
The background is that I take some pictures of crystals using a
highspeed filmcamera which works with laser light.

PAUL IS ALPHA SOFTWARE!
You should expect errors.

The intention is to get a "digital" film.  Using a slide-scanner
(Nikon LS-20) I scan the images by a program derived from SANE's
xscanimage (I changed xscanimage to get PNG-images with special
chunks I want to use in paul).

Some special features I needed for my hobby of photographie were
added which make paul interesting for common usage.  Especially
HTML editors will find a usefull tool when trying to build
click-able maps of images.

So what is PAUL:
Short:
   Yet another image viewer.
Longer:
   - Special designed for *sequences* of images.
   - Works best with gray-scaled images, but can handle any 24-Bit
     images, off course
     (Remark: Gray scaled images are *displayed* green! It has
      technical reasons to use the other colors internally.  Don't
      be afraid that your output will be green.  It's normal monochrom
      image.)
   - GTK userinterface (almost all features are available from command
     line and there are some which are not implemented into the
     GUI yet, but it is work in progress)
   - several transformations can be done quiet in background
     (may be any console), as `convert` from ImageMagick does
   - Because of using Imlib it is *fast* and can handle any image
     format.
   - May be it's possible to do all the image processing stuff of
     paul with GIMP.  But the special features are easier available
     and designed for only this special purpose (may be I write
     some parts of paul as plug-in for gimp).
     The function to cut parts of an image is better, i.e. more minute
     than this one of the gimp, because it is possible to posittion the
     cutting box via entering pixel coordinates ... yet another
     (not seen by me) philosophy of cutting an image.
   - The feature to insert thumbnails into an image and output
     a HTML file which uses the image as click-able map and installs
     a link to a user supplied URL under the thumbnail is very
     easy to use and I havn't seen such a beast anywhere else.
     Hopefully it will be a useful tool for HTML editors.  This tool
     is hidden in the menu "This Image/Insert" and requires to
     select an operating widget.  For a detailed explanation please
     read the file "clickable-map.howto" carefully.
   - May be you can view your images using XV, but paul is free.
     Paul is released under GPL.  I don't want to
     compete with any other image viewer like xv or display, but
     I don't use them since several month.
   - Yet another userinterface:
     Paul works with the following menu structure:
         File: (what would you expect under this item :))
         This Image: Operation to single image
         Marked Images: Operation on all marked images
         All Images: Operation on all loaded images
         Parameters: Set global parameters for the tree operation types
   - There is only a `not yet finished` documentation in German
     language.
     I'm sure that there will be no English documentation in the near future, 
     because this program was designed for German native speakers at my 
     working group and parts of this documentation will go into my theses.
     If there will be a greater resonance I could think about English
     documentation but not before October 1999.

System requirements:
- Unix (I've heard rumors about some other things simulating
  operating systems starting with the letter `W'.  The libraries
  mentioned seem to compile under those things in the development
  versions.  So future versions of paul could run there, but I
  will not support it.  If there is interest I would include
  user-supplied patches of course.)
- Gtk+ version 1.2 (at least 1.1.13)
- GdkImlib greater or equal version 1.9.2 and the necessary graphics
  libraries for GdkImlib which are libpng, libtif, libgif or libungif, libjpeg
- FFTW
  For those who don't want to install this (very good!) library
  there are #defines which disable the FFT stuff if configure
  cant find the library.
- Gtk Databox from Roland Bock.  The source as well as Debian Packages
  are available at
    ftp://tower.physik.uni-halle.de/pub/debian-maintain/gtkdatabox  .
- Gtk Imreg -- small library to deal with image regions written by me.
  It was split from paul to give GTK programmers a chance to use the
  image cut feature and image inserting feature from paul.  It is available
  at
    ftp://tower.physik.uni-halle.de/pub/debian-maintain/gtkimreg

Source and Debian package location:

  ftp://tower.physik.uni-halle.de/pub/debian-maintain/paul/

Any comments, bug reports, bug fixes (prefered :) ) to
  tille@physik.uni-halle.de