--- /dev/null
+PngMinus
+--------
+(copyright Willem van Schaik, 1999)
+
+
+License
+-------
+
+Permission to use, copy, modify, and distribute this software and
+its documentation for any purpose and without fee is hereby granted,
+provided that the above copyright notice appear in all copies and
+that both that copyright notice and this permission notice appear in
+supporting documentation. This software is provided "as is" without
+express or implied warranty.
+
+
+Some history
+------------
+Soon after the creation of PNG in 1995, the need was felt for a set of
+pnmtopng / pngtopnm utilities. Independantly Alexander Lehmann and I
+(Willem van Schaik) started such a project. Luckily we discovered this
+and merged the two together into pnmtopng.tar.gz, which is available
+from a/o ftp://swrinde.nde.swri.edu/pub/png/.
+
+These two utilities have many, many options and make use of most of the
+features of PNG, like gamma, alpha, sbit, text-chunks, etc. This makes
+the utilities quite complex and by now not anymore very maintainable.
+When we wrote these programs, libpng was still in an early stage.
+Therefore, lots of the functionality that we put in our software can now
+be done using transform-functions in libpng.
+
+Finally, to compile these programs, you need to have installed and
+compiled three libraries: libpng, zlib and netpbm. Especially the latter
+makes the whole setup a bit bulky. But that's unavoidable given the many
+features of pnmtopng.
+
+
+What now
+--------
+At this moment libpng is in a very stable state and can do much of the
+work done in pnmtopng. Also, pnmtopng needs to be upgraded to the new
+interface of libpng. Hence, it is time for a rewrite from the ground up
+of pnmtopng and pngtopnm. This will happen in the near future (stay
+tuned). The new package will get a different name to distinguish it from
+the old one: PngPlus.
+
+To experiment a bit with the new interface of libpng, I started off with
+a small prototype that contains only the basic functionality. It doesn't
+have any of the options to read or write special chunks and it will do
+no gamma correction. But this makes it also a simple program that is
+quite easy to understand and can serve well as a template for other
+software developments. (By now there are of course a couple of programs,
+like Greg Roelofs' rpng/wpng, that can be used just as good.)
+
+
+Can and can not
+---------------
+As this is the small brother of the future PngPlus, I called this fellow
+PngMinus. Because I started this development in good-old Turbo-C, I
+avoided the use the netpbm library, which requires DOS extenders. Again,
+another reason to call it PngMinus (minus netpbm :-). So, part of the
+program are some elementary routines to read / write pgm- and ppm-files.
+It does not read b&w pbm-files.
+
+The downside of this approach is that you can not use them on images
+that require blocks of memory bigger than 64k (the DOS version). For
+larger images you will get an out-of-memory error.
+
+As said before, PngMinus doesn't correct for gamma. When reading
+png-files you can do this just as well by piping the output of png2pnm
+to pnmgamma, one of the standard PbmPlus tools. This same scenario will
+most probably also be followed in the full-blown future PngPlus, with
+the addition of course of the possibility to create gamma-chunks when
+writing png-files.
+
+On the other hand it supports alpha-channels. When reading a png-image
+you can write the alpha-channel into a pgm-file. And when creating an
+RGB+A png-image, you just combine a ppm-file with a corresponding
+pgm-file containing the alpha-channel. When reading, transparency chunks
+are converted into an alpha-channel and from there on treated the same
+way.
+
+Finally you can opt for writing ascii or binary pgm- and ppm-files. When
+the bit-depth is 16, the format will always be ascii.
+
+
+Using it
+--------
+To distinguish them from pnmtopng and PngPlus, the utilities are named
+png2pnm and pnm2png (2 instead of to). The input- and output-files can
+be given as parameters or through redirection. Therefore the programs
+can be part of a pipe.
+
+To list the options type "png2pnm -h" or "pnm2png -h".
+
+
+Just like Scandinavian furniture
+--------------------------------
+You have to put it together yourself. I did test the software under
+MS-DOS with Turbo-C 3.0 and under RedHat Linux 4.2 with gcc. In both
+cases I used libpng-1.0.4 and zlib-1.1.3. Later versions should be OK,
+however some older libpng versions have a bug in pngmem.c when using
+Turbo-C 3.0 (see below).
+
+You can build it using one of the two makefiles (make -f makefile.###)
+or use the batch/script files pngminus.bat / pngminus.sh. This assumes
+that you have built the libraries in ../libpng and ../zlib. Using Linux,
+make sure that you have built libpng with makefile.std and not
+makefile.linux (also called .lnx in earlier versions of libpng). The
+latter creates a .so shared-library, while the PngMinus makefile assumes
+a normal .a static library.
+
+If you create a ../pngsuite directory and then store the basn####.png
+files from PngSuite (http://www.schaik.com/pngsuite/) in there, you can
+test in one go the proper functioning of PngMinus, see png2pnm.bat and
+pnm2png.bat (or the .sh versions).
+
+
+Warranty
+-------
+Please, remember that this was just a small experiment to learn a few
+things. It will have many unforeseen features <vbg>. Who said bugs? Use
+it when you are in need for something simple or when you want to start
+developing your own stuff.
+
+
+The Turbo bug
+-------------
+** pngmem.old
+ hptr = (png_byte huge *)((long)(hptr) & 0xfffffff0L);
+ hptr += 16L;
+** pngmem.c
+ hptr = (png_byte huge *)((long)(hptr) & 0xfffffff0L);
+ hptr = hptr + 16L;
+**
+
+** pngmem.old
+ png_ptr->offset_table_ptr[i] = (png_bytep)hptr;
+ hptr += (png_uint_32)65536L;
+** pngmem.c
+ png_ptr->offset_table_ptr[i] = (png_bytep)hptr;
+ hptr = hptr + 65536L;
+**
+
+
+The end
+-------
+Willem van Schaik
+mailto:willem@schaik.com
+http://www.schaik.com/png/
+-------
+Oct 1999
+
projects / synfig.git / blobdiff