Resolving a problem

[unixronin]

Well, a bug, actually.  In XV.  Who else out there still uses XV?  Sure, it's old, but it still works as well as it ever did.¹

When you go to print an image, though, XV's calculation of the as-printed image resolution in dpi is, uh ... well, let's be polite and call it imaginative.  Or we could be impolite and say the dpi value is calculated by a crack-smoking monkey playing with a Ouija board.  It certainly doesn't bear much resemblance to reality.  It calculates different as-printed resolution (different by about a third) for the same image printed with the same margins on the same paper on the same printer, depending whether image and page are in portrait or landscape orientation.²

This patch fixes that and makes the dpi figure pretty accurately (i.e, ±1dpi) reflect reality.  If you don't already know how to apply it, you probably shouldn't be messing with it, and probably don't use XV anyway.

[1]  OK, so it doesn't scale images as cleanly as, say, the Gimp does, and it has never displayed GIF animation.³  Nobody said it was perfect.

[2]  Or, more clearly, with either both image and page portrait or with both landscape.

[3]  And besides, you have Xanim for that.  Right?  :)

Comments

[otherbill.livejournal.com]

I only quit using xv recently, when the workstations I use were migrated to a different flavor of linux where (1) its source code wouldn't compile cleanly (WTH?), and (2) ee was included in the stardard build.

Good to know about the patch, though.

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

I understand many recent Linux distributions require a patch to compile XV. The patch is pretty trivial though. IIRC, it just requires an #ifdef around one #include.

[unix-jedi.livejournal.com]

Who else out there still uses XV?

*Looks around furtively*

Uh, Me? Was I not supposed to be?

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

Well if I wasn't supposed to, nobody told me ....

[mrmeval.livejournal.com]

On a laptop that can't run win95!
http://www.svgalib.org/rus/zgv/

:-P :-P :-P :-P

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

That looks like a goodie, too.

'Course, I learned recently that the Jim Frost I know is the Jim Frost who wrote xloadimage (http://www.frostbytes.com/~jimf/xloadimage.html). (Which happens to be one of the very, very few applications out there that knows how to read native Voyager probe images.)

[mrmeval.livejournal.com]

I did use that at one time. It was the only thing that worked right in X as an image viewer. I'd forgotten about it because for a short time the systems I've been using worked.

I might change it back now as most of the ones I've got suck in various ways.

[mrmeval.livejournal.com]

Bummer!

http://www.babcom.com/public/xv-dpi-patch.diff either doesn't exist any more, has been moved someplace else, never existed in the first place, or has been abducted from its bed by grey-skinned aliens who are at this moment performing horrific medical experiments on it as it lies paralyzed but fully aware, strapped to a cold metal table, screaming in helpless agony and terror.

Then again, maybe all web pages exist in a superposition of quantum states like Schrödinger's cat, and you were just dead unlucky on this one. You should never have opened the box.

(Or maybe you just mistyped it... but that would be boring. Wouldn't it?)

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

Oops. Actually, I was the one who mistyped it. ;) Color me sheepish....

[mrmeval.livejournal.com]

It was a luck mistype because that 404 is hilarious!

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

It's a random-generator CGI. :) I add new variations as I think of them.

(Feel free to suggest themes.)

[smandal.livejournal.com]

I remember when I was a high school intern at Naval Research Labs my boss put me in charge of getting make and perl to work on the VMS Alpha machine I was working on. Soon enough I got xv and xanim to work, and ported some games :)

Now I use eog (the GNOME image viewer) because it integrates with Evolution and the rest of the desktop, and ImageMagick for transforming raster images.

Of course, GNOME has become horrific bloatware, and I hope Étoilé (http://etoileos.com/) goes supercritical.