PAUL - yet another image viewer

paul = Program zur Auswertung und Umwandlung von Laserbildern

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

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 photography were added which make paul interesting for common usage. Especially HTML editors will find a useful 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 monochrome image.)

• GTK user-interface (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 position the cutting box via entering pixel coordinates ... yet another philosophy of cutting an image (which I had not seen in any other image processing software).

• 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 have not 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 user-interface:
  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, 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 next year.

Why did I put paul into Debian?

• May be there is need for such a thing?
• I want to do more than only package other peoples software.
• May be someone can use some ideas of paul?
• May be that more people can detect more bugs and I can make paul more stable.

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
• 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 here.
• 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.

Screen shot:

Source and Debian package:

Questions to Andreas Tille

Homepage of Andreas Tille Back to my other Debian packages