[therion] Re: therion and contours

[John Pybus]

Wookey wrote:

> +++ Stacho Mudrak [04-03-02 16:28 +0100]:
>
>>> 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.
>>
>>
>> No comment. You can try, if you do not believe. The only solution is writing Tcl extension in C...
>
>
>
> I didn't mean that writing it would not be difficult, I meant that the
> problem of not being able to zoom large images is a serious useability
> problem for real users (we have <10 I am aware of and two of them have
> complained already :-) .
> You suggested 'buy a bigger machine', which is OK up to a point but I'd much
> prefer making the software smarter. I realise that this is not easy.


On the other hand, would this be a good us of limited developer resources?  The smallest machine I still use, my laptop, has 256Mb of RAM, and this is capable (just about) of handling a 10Mb gif of a >A4 scan.  Admittedly, if you zoom to 200% it hits the VM system pretty hard (340Mb process size) but it is usable once you've waited for the scaling operation to finish.  As time goes by, any efforts to support small memory systems will bring diminishing returns as average system sizes increase.

Personally, I'd rather see effort to support other vector output formats  such as SVG, which would be easier to import into other editing and publishing tools for further manipulation or inclusion in larger publications.

Yours,

John