Graphics Software

In addition to the mathematical/numerical software packages such as Matlab, Mathematica, Maple, and IDL, the Unix computers of the APPM computer lab have the following programs which are for graphics modification and conversion. They may be useful for creating, viewing, or "postproduction" of graphics produced by other software, for making images suitable for inclusion in documentation or web pages.

These are all public domain software; be sure to notify UnixOps if any of them are not working on the newton clients. (Be sure that the pbmplus and ImageMagick directories are in your search path.)

xv, xgrabsc, xanim, xpaint, giftrans, gifmerge,
ps2gif, gifsize & jpgsize, pbmplus, ImageMagick

xv

Use this to display, manipulate, crop, resize, and convert images in PNG or JPG format. Also useful for editing an image's color table or grabbing a portion of the X display to save in a file.

xgrabsc

Grabs all or part of the display on an X Window computer's display and saves it to a file.

xanim

Display/animate a sequence of images or an animated GIF.

xpaint

Simple drawing program good for touching up bitmap images. Includes ``fill'' and text annotation facilities.

giftrans

Makes a designated color in a GIF image ``transparent''. (may be in /usr/local/pbmplus/bin)

gifmerge

Combines a sequence of GIF images into a single ``animated GIF'' file.

pngsize, jpgsize

compose an HTML <IMG> tag for a PNG (JPEG) image with the correct width and height values.

pbmplus package

The more than 150 executables in this package (directory /usr/local/pbmplus/bin) are used to convert images in any bitmap format to any other bitmap format. (Note: this does not include JPEG format!) Some of the most often-used of these executables are

giftopnm
giftoppm
ppmtogif
tifftopnm
pnmtotiff

Manual pages for all of these programs are available (in /usr/local/pbmplus/man).

ImageMagick package

The 8 executables of this package (directory /usr/local/ImageMagick/bin) perform a wide variety of tasks.

identify: Describes the format and characteristics of an image file.
convert: Converts an image from one format to another -- including JPEG and PostScript formats! Can do many alterations (cropping, adding a border, despeckling, resizing, many others) along the way.
mogrify: transforms an image in any of dozens of ways; scale, rotate, crop/border, blur, simplify color table, dither, draw, emboss, annotate, interlace, etc. Although XV does most of what mogrify does, the latter can do it at the command line -- or in batch mode -- without the need for X Windows.
combine, montage: combine images to create new images or composites
display, animate, import: Use to display/manipulate an image, display a sequence of images, or capture some or all of an X server screen and save the image to a file; the programs XV and xanim and xgrabsc do most of the same things better. ''Display'' will accept more formats than xv.