I'm researching a bit into what is needed for the insetgraphics, one of the main things is to be able to read the image file and show it in the LyX window (hmpf, that's obvious) currently this is done by going to ghostscript and asking it to create the X11 Pixmap (or something of this kind). This is obviously very unfriendly to the guindepence that is intended in the (near) future, and is ugly to read and code. When looking over the libraries on my system I found imlib which is an X or GDK image library (it support both X and GDK). X will be usefull for all X and GDK will be usefull for the GTK+/Gnome version. The added bonus of this library is the fact that you can give it a file and it will read it, parse it and render it with all that is needed, like taking care of transparencies, enlarging/reducing, color depth with dithering. And various other nifty features that I didn't look through. This means that most of the work is offloaded from LyX and is given to imlib, obviously a future native port to win32 will require another solution (but then the current method would require that too). What this will lead to is that in the Painter class we'll have a drawImage() that will load and render the image. Several problems that come to my mind now, one thing is that imlib doesn't handle eps natively, it uses netpbm or ImageMagick to translate that (we use ghostscript, it cant be any worse than what we have now). Another problem is that I do not know if it works in the background or will try to load the image immediately (delaying the user), this can probably be overcome by using a thread/fork to load it in the background, much as we do now. And the last problem is that it will require additional dependency from LyX. We currently use XPM library, and I tried to see if it will be usefull, however it seems that translating to XPM is wastefull, and XPM is intended for icons mostly, so the hard work will probably fall on us (that is, me), the plus side of XPM is that it's more likely to be installed almost everywhere (a.e. of measure theory for the mathematicians of us). What do you say? -- Baruch Even http://techst02.technion.ac.il/~sbaruch/ (My Site) http://rpghost.com/jindor/ (My brothers AD&D site) " Learn to laugh ... it's the path to true love! " - The Angel in the movie Michael
