Queries and comments on 0.2.17

[Stacho Mudrak]

> Presumably the software could be made to manage larger images better (like
> photo-editing software can load file _much_ bigger than the available
> memory). a 4MB scan shouldn't be 'too large to zoom' - it will catch users out.


I'm afraid, reducing memory usage would increase the processor usage. The only way how to solve this problem is hardware update. We've been programming therion with 150MHz and 48MB RAM. But when we started to enter real data - we were forced to upgrade. Now it looks, that 2GHz and 512MB ram is OK for A4 scans at 100dpi.

> Perhaps the zoom should only attemtp to zoom the visible part of the image,
> not the whole thing. That would be sensible use of resources. Is this a TCL
> feature that it will be hard to change?


This would take too much effort... Handling bitmap images in TCL is very limited. Anyway, you can spit images by your self in Photoshop or Gimp and turn on/off selected pictures visibility (last check box in the [Background images]). We've done it this way and it helped us a lot. In the file menu, there is also option Open XP (Excluding pictures). This is also very usefull for debugging.

> And a key! there are nothing like enough keyboard shortcuts. Mice are nasty
> and give you RSI :-)


Could you please write down all the key-bindings (with exact keys) you would like to have in xtherion. Than I can add them in the next release.

S.