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.