therion and contours

[Wookey]

+++ John Pybus [04-03-03 12:10 +0000]:

>> Wookey wrote:
>
>>> >+++ Stacho Mudrak [04-03-02 16:28 +0100]:
>>> >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,


OK, but I don't own _any_ machines with that _much_ ram (and I've got 5,
excluding ARM machines and PDAs)! The only one I have access to with >256 Mb
of RAM is the server here and that already jammed up against it's memory
limits doing other things anyway.

I can accept that my machine can't really cope with the 28000x16000 scan I
tried to autotrace recently, but I think I ought to be able to zoom in on a
4MB image without it exploding (having doubled up my ram to 128MB I can now
just about do that). Erin and duncan are in china and are skint - they are
likely to be working with less-than-state-of-the-art equipment too.

>> 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.


Fair enough, and of course Stacho can decide what he wants to do too - this
is very much a 'scratch your own itch' project. I'm just asserting that the
current limitations are a problem for me, and for Erin, and I think they'll
bite quite a few others too. Obviously if no-one wants to actually do
anything about it, then things will stay as they are, but it will affect the
uptake of Therion.

The other argument for better efficiency in this regard is using therion on
small machines in the field, which is something I'd like to see be possible
at some point, but that might require a move away from TCL anyway in the
interests of efficiency, in which case this particular problem goes
away/changes anyway.

Wookey
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