On Friday 26 April 2002 2:23 pm, Ronald Florence wrote: > Angus Leeming writes: > > Allow me to introduce myself: I'm the guy who's responsible for 1.2's > graphics support. Before you reach for the "reply" button and deluge me > with complaints [...] > > Not exactly a complaint, but is it possible to revive the .ps/.eps > rendering scheme of LyX-1.1.5 and before with LyX-1.2.0? I've > recently built 1.2.0, and tried it with both a long LyX file which > incorporates a number of photographs and with the UserGuide.lyx. For > reasons you complain, even after I installed convert, the images don't > render on screen. Both files come up relatively quickly in Lyx-1.1.5. > What troubles me, as I contemplate upgrading my xforms library and run > the risk of breaking Lyx-1.1.5, is that the multi-step rendering > process for on-screen images in Lyx-1.2.0 seems complicated, > kluge-like, wasteful of temporary file space, and s-l-o-w. > > Can I configure Lyx-1.2.0 to use ghostscript to directly render the > on-screen images in the manner of Lyx-1.1.5? Or is the use of > intermediate file formats (xpm or ppm) just a fact-of-life for the new > version of LyX?
It's a fact of life. The code has been rewritten entirely. There were some really good reasons for doing so and we won't be going back. Now that xforms has gone open source, and once xforms 1.0 is released (start of May, apparently), then no-one will have a real excuse to stay with xforms 0.88 or early 0.89. Then none of you'll be using the libXpm-based loader. The converter mechanism is extremely powerful. It is most-certainly NOT a kludge. If you can define a converter from your graphics format to EPS, you can use it with LaTeX. If you define a converter to a "loadable" format, then you can view it in LyX. xforms will load many, many formats directly. The only real PITA is EPS itself. Now that xforms is Open Source, that's likely to change. As for speed: "convert" is slow, but I tend to use the netpbm suite of converters here. Much, much quicker. Ok, I haven't found an alternative for EPS but you might. And anyway, since the graphics loading is performed asynchronously, you could always get on and do some work ;-) Finally, I suspect that the images don't come up on screen for perfectly valid reasons to do with "convert" creating wierd XPM files. I've already explained how to work around that if you're using the xforms-based image loader. If, however, you're using the libXPM-based loader, then 1. Scrub the ???->XPM converters in /usr/local/share/lyx/lyxrc.defaults that use "convert" to do the job. 2. Use "convert" to create PPM files instead. These are always valid. 3. Define a PPM->XPM converter using ppmtoxpm. (man ppmtoxpm). These are also always valid. Angus
