[Xastir] More attempts to compile...(RH9)

[Henk de Groot]

At 09:51 14-10-03 -0700, Curt Mills, WE7U wrote:
>Our fighting chance would be to dump ImageMagick once and for all,
>in favor of GDAL and perhaps additionally GraphicsMagick, for those
>image formats that GDAL doesn't support.  Most users would have
>everything they need just be installing GDAL.

Hopefully it will also be faster... I tried to load a big map the other day 
and it takes quite some time for ImageMagick to render an image. This was 
both in Xastir as in ImageMagick itself. In fact it was a litte too big for 
ImageMagick (only a 4000x5000 pixel .JPEG) and it crashed on me (leaving a 
200 MB temporary file in /tmp behind).

I then tried XV to show the same image and it was much, much and much 
faster and also didn't have any problem whatsoever with the size. XV as 
shareware is not realy an option for Xastir (if it is possible at all to 
interface with it) but I hope there is an alternative that is something 
much faster, efficient and stable than ImageMagick. XV shows me that it is 
most certainly possible.

By the way, when converted to 8 bit pp .BMP or .GIF it does show up in 
XASTIR. WinAPRS only barely takes it and only when it is converted to .GIF 
(8 bit pp .BMP shows up as black). In UIVIEW I can only make the map 
visible when I reduce the size to 45% of the original size! So XASTIR wins 
hands down.

Another big plus of XASTIR is that I can overlay the map with vector data, 
I vectorized GPS tracks and can check the allignment of the map. I used GPS 
TrackMaker (www.gpstm.com) to find the corners of the picture, I also had 
to rotate the map 0.5 degrees right to make it fit exactly with the 
tracks), but XASTIR allows me to verify the .geo file easily.

Kind regards,

Henk.