imview - displays and interactively analyses images
imview [ options ] [ image ... ]
Where image is an image file in one of the supported formats, e.g:
TIFF, JPEG, GIF, PNG, BMP, XPM, PNM, etc...
Imview is an X11 and Windows GDI GUI application for
displaying images on screen. It has advanced capabilities for interactive
image analysis (getting information out of images) and can be easily
controlled through a socket connection for embedding in image analysis
systems.
Imview supports a large number of popular and scientific image
file formats, in part through the use of the ImageMagick library.
Here is the complete list of optional arguments for
imview.
- -
- Reads an image from the standard input stream. Example:
- -a
- Reads and appends to an existing pointfile (see option -p).
- -C <lutname>
- Specifies <lutname> as the default look-up tables for all the images
on the command line.
- -c <lutname>
- Applies the look-up table <lutname> to the preceding image on
the command line (see example section).
- -debug
- Starts a debugging GUI console where debugging messages can be seen (there
are lots of them!). Under Unix messages are also appended to the file
/tmp/imbugs.txt.
- -delete
- Any image given to imview on the command line will be deleted after
imview exits. This is useful when imview is started from an
interpreter with a temporary image as argument. For safety only images
with paths beginning with /tmp, /usr/tmp or under the standard environment
variable-controlled TMPDIR directory are effectively deleted.
- -disable_io_keys
- This option disables some I/O shortcut that are not menu-dependent, such
as c that closes an image. This is useful in conjunction with options
-hide_menubar and -disable_menubar for limiting the user's
interaction with the application.
- This option completely disables the menu bar (but does not hide it, see
-hide_menubar for that). Both hiding and disabling the menubar at
the same time can be useful for producing a viewer that users cannot
control other than through some other means than the menu (if
imview is embedded in another application for example).
- -disable_quit
- This option disables the shortcut ways of quitting the imview
application, such as the Escape key, clicking the windows manager `close
window' button, etc. This is useful to restrict the user's control over
imview.
- -fork
- Sends imview to the background (works on all platforms including
windows). It is better to use this option rather than the shell semantics
(adding & at the end of the command under Unix) when the server is ran
in conjunction with -server, because imview will synchronize the
foreground and background processes so that the foreground process can
know the server port number.
- -gamma
<value>
- Sets the default gamma for all the images. A gamma between 0 and 1.0 will
darken the displayed image while a gamma greater than 1.0 will brighten
them.
- -h
- Prints an abbreviated list of options and exits.
- Hides the main menubar. The menu items are still accessible via shortcuts.
For example try Alt+f to get the file->open menu. From there you can
use the keyboard arrow keys to select a menu item for example. This is
useful if you have little screen real estate, but confusing for the
beginner!
- -no_dblbuf
- Do not use double buffering at certain zoom factors. This is a hack you
might want to experiment with if you find that imview does not
redraw some parts of images after closing and re-opening images.
- -locked
- Equivalent to all the following options used together:
-hide_menubar, -disable_menubar, -disable_iokeys and
-disable_quit. If run with this option, imview can only be
controlled via a socket in server mode. This is useful for embedding
imview in another application.
- -mag <zoom
facto>
- Magnifies all images by <zoom factors>. Any positive value is legal.
Values between 0 and 1.0 will reduce the size of the images while values
greater than 1.0 will expand them.
- -no_magick
- Disables the use of the ImageMagick library. This library is very useful
for reading and writing a large number of file formats but tries to do too
much sometimes, such as converting text files to images.
- -p <pointfile>
- Specifies the point file name. A pointfile is a regular text file in which
point (pixel) information can be recorded. The default point file name is
pointfile. This option simply changes that default, no other action is
taken.
- -portfile
<file>
- This option is only useful in combination with -server.
Imview's server binds to a port in the range 7600-7700. Because it
is often useful to have more than one image server at the same time and
because of the interactive nature of imview, the precise port
number is impossible to predict, so when the server is started it prints
the port it decided to bind against on the command line, or alternatively
in a file, specified by this option.
NOTE: If you are planning to send imview to the
background, for this command to work as expected, you must also use the
-fork option, otherwise the file might still be empty when the
command returns.
- -server
- Starts the imview server. In server mode imview performs as
a TCP/IP server on which images can be uploaded and commands can be run.
The aim is to make imview completely remote-controllable: every
command accessible via the menu can also be made available through the
server.
Imview uses its own text-based protocol. For simple
commands a standard telnet session is enough to communicate with
imview. However for uploading images into imview a
protocol similar to FTP has been implemented. A simple imview
client is shipped in source form with the imview distribution. For a
specification of the imview protocol see the full
documentation.
Imview's server port number is in the range 7600-7700
which allows up to 50 different imview server to be run on the same
machine (each server uses up two ports: one for commands and the other
for binary data exchange, such as uploading images).
- -stopdebug
- Used in conjunction with -debug, will stop the program after each
debugging message. To continue the user must type <Enter>.
- -v
- Prints the version and build numbers, the date of build, the configuration
options and exits.
- -wt <title>
- Changes the title of the main window. The default is Imview.
In the following examples `%' indicate the shell prompt.
% imview
Simply starts imview displaying the splash screen. An image can
then be loaded using the menus.
% imview myimage.tiff
Will display image myimage.tiff.
% imview /home/talbot/images/astro/*
Will display all images in the directory
/home/talbot/images/astro/. Use <spacebar> to switch from one image to
the next.
% imview aGreyLevelImage.tif -c heat.lut
Will display image aGreyLevelImage.tif. Assuming this image only
contains grey-level information (a black and white photograph for example),
the false colours defined in heat.lut will be applied to it.
% imview -server -fork
Port: 7600
This will start imview in server mode. The only difference
with the normal mode is that imview can now be
"remote-controlled" via a TCP/IP connection. The port
imview is bound to is printed on the command line when the server
starts. To save it to a file use the -portfile option.
A simple telnet session can be used to remote-control
imview, as follows. See the full documentation for more details:
% telnet localhost 7600
user talbot
Welcome, talbot /tmp/fileBlabla 000 OK
load "/home/talbot/images/astro/neptune.tiff"
000 OK
zoom factor 2
000 OK
end
Connection closed by foreign host.
imclient is shipped with the source distribution as an
implementation of a sample client that can upload images into imview, as
follows:
% imclient -p 7600 /home/talbot/images/astro/jupiter.tiff
See the TODO file in the source distribution or the web site for
an updated list of known bugs. Here is a list of the most significant
ones:
- •
- resize still a problem sometimes. Imview gets itself into a weird state
with incorrect limits and partial redraws. Specifying a complete redraw
should clear everything but doesn't.
- •
- Move to the middle of the screen. Sometimes for no apparent reason Imview
moves to the middle of the screen. This seems to be happening if the main
window resises.
- •
- last line and last column of image often missing when scrollbar are
present.
- ~/.fltk/hugues.talbot_csiro.au/imview.prefs
- User preferences
- <Installation directory>/Imview/*.lut
- Colour look-up tables
- <Installation directory>/Imview/doc/*.html
- On-line documentation
imclient (1), ImageMagick (1), djpeg (1)
libtiff (3T)
http://imview.sourceforge.net (full manual can be found
there).
The main author is Hugues Talbot
<Hugues.Talbot@cmis.CSIRO.AU>
Imview is Copyrighted (C) 1997-2002 by Hugues Talbot and was
supported in parts by the Australian Commonwealth Science and Industry
Research Organisation. Please see web site for full details.
This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or
modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or (at your
option) any later version.
This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General
Public License for more details.
You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License
along with this program; if not, write to the Free Software Foundation,
Inc., 59 Temple Place, Suite 330, Boston, MA 02111, USA.