Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!clyde.concordia.ca!uunet!snorkelwacker!mit-eddie!uw-beaver!ubc-cs!alberta!dvinci!news
From: macphed@dvinci!herald.usask.ca (Ian MacPhedran,2B13 Eng.,4832)
Newsgroups: comp.windows.x
Subject: Re: Xloadimage patchlevel 04 now available
Message-ID: <1990Mar1.012659.20273@dvinci.usask.ca>
Date: 1 Mar 90 01:26:59 GMT
References: <4210@accuvax.nwu.edu>
Sender: news@dvinci.usask.ca
Reply-To: macphed@dvinci!herald.usask.ca
Organization: University of Saskatchewan
Lines: 34

From article <4210@accuvax.nwu.edu>, by mccoy@ils.nwu.edu (Jim McCoy):
> In article <16331@well.sf.ca.us>, jef@well.sf.ca.us (Jef Poskanzer) writes:
>> -- I'm just curious as to whether PBMPLUS could be
>> improved somehow.
> 
> Other than perhaps giving people the option of rolling all the little
> programs into one comprehensive utility, I can't think of anything...
> 

This is straying from the original topic, but... (I'd stay on the original,
but I don't have access to the InterNet for ftp access to get the patches
to xloadimage ...)

A wrapper program could easily be written to take an arbitrary input
and output format and convert between them, or use the other utilities
in Jef's package. However, rolling all the programs into one would make
one huge program, which would carry unnecessary overhead. As well, it
may be difficult to automatically determine which input image file type
is being used. (Michael Mauldin's FBM package does this for several types,
but there are other types with no `magic numbers'.)

I am somewhat more on Jef's ``side'' here ... I'd prefer to have a
viewer for an ultimate image format, and conversion utlities to get
other image types into/outof this format. Unfortunately, no such format
exists (in my opinion).

Sorry if this is somewhat out of date by the time it gets out. I'm
behind in reading this group.

Ian.

Ian MacPhedran, Engineering Computer Centre, University of Saskatchewan.
2B13 Engineering Building, U. of S. Campus, Saskatoon, Sask., CANADA S7N 0W0
macphed@dvinci.USask.CA  macphedran@sask.USask.CA  macphedran@sask.BITNET