+++ Erin Lynch [04-03-01 20:18 -0800]:
Hi Wooks,
Just wanted to let you know that we're thinking about using Therion to trace contours and then writing a script to convert from Therion to survex legs.
Interesting idea. If you need this then maybe Therion should incorporate something like it more directly, although I'm not sure how exactly...
It should be doable, but we're having a few problems with our installation of Therion. The biggest one is that if you zoom in on a big map the whole thing just becomes unfeasibly slow. Dunks thinks it's probably making a bitmap (or something) of the entire image at high res, which is why it's so slow. Any ideas?
Yep - that's right, in fact there is more than one copy. I found the same problem. (on a 64MB machine attemting to zoom to 200% on a 4MB scan makes the whole thing disapear in a puff of smoke). Complaining to the Therion list elicited this explanation:
200% of 3.8Mb = 4Mb original image + 16Mb scaled image + 20Mb canvas RGBA buffer = 40MB = 60% of RAM. This may be a problem, especially on some operating systems.
The problem is that tcl's functions are used for the image management. tcl stores images internally as full RGB, so making them b/w or greyscale doesn't save any RAM, and it doesn't do anything clever like image-manipulation programs to only expand the visible tile. Something could probably be done to improve this but it's not trivial. This is a tradeoff of using a quick-prototyping language for the GUI rather than doing it the hard way. For the tme being you need to work with either a machine with loads of RAM or smaller images. Some work to see if TCL's handing can be improved in this regard would also be a good idea. I agree it's a serious problem, stacho doesn't seem entirely convinced yet.
The other problem is that the lines, control points and handles are all a bit too chunky to be useable. Any idea what magic rune we need to change in order to make them a bit smaller?
Nope - ask the list - they are _really_ helpful. (the ctrl modified lets you place points very close to other points which helps with the 'can't zoom' problem). cc:ed to Therion list Wookey -- Aleph One Ltd, Bottisham, CAMBRIDGE, CB5 9BA, UK Tel +44 (0) 1223 811679 work: http://www.aleph1.co.uk/ play: http://www.chaos.org.uk/~wookey/