Arjen de Ruijter (Arjen.deRuijter@bk.tudelft.nl) writes on 06 Sep 94:
>Is there another way to import a 'common' bitmap into Grass. I mean formats
>as TIFF, GIF, etc.
>The r.in.sunrast option doesn't work on my type of sunrast files.
(you might try using xv or pbmplus to save it in the other variant
of sun raster files).
ideally, we should have r.in.ppm since netpbm (pbmplus) is distributed
with grass. That way we don't need r.in.sunrast, r.in.tiff,
r.in.gif, etc. Am I correct in this thinking? Is there any instance
where ppm is not generic enough?
It shouldn't be hard to write - anyone working on it?
>Arjen de Ruijter
--Darrell
Am I right in stating that ppm is not the ideal format to use as standard
input (or output) from GRASS, even when it's PD? To my experience ppm
files become very large and pbmplus is definitely slower than for
example xv or Image Alchemy - maybe that's not an issue for everyone, but
on my Sun IPC I don't want to spend much CPU and disk space on converting
images. The real problem with pbmplus seems that it uses ppm,pgm and pbm as
an intermediate format for every conversion, whereas e.g. Image Alchemy
(at least that's what it seems to do) converts directly from one format
to the other. But I totally agree with Darrell that it's completely
useless to write conversion routines for GRASS where there are several
packages around that do that kind of stuff; maybe we should try to
convince the authors of the other packages to include an export option to
GRASS.
ideally, we should have r.in.ppm since netpbm (pbmplus) is distributed
with grass. That way we don't need r.in.sunrast, r.in.tiff,
r.in.gif, etc. Am I correct in this thinking? Is there any instance
where ppm is not generic enough?
--Darrell
Am I right in stating that ppm is not the ideal format to use as standard
input (or output) from GRASS, even when it's PD? To my experience ppm
files become very large and pbmplus is definitely slower than for
example xv or Image Alchemy - maybe that's not an issue for everyone, but
on my Sun IPC I don't want to spend much CPU and disk space on converting
images. The real problem with pbmplus seems that it uses ppm,pgm and pbm as
an intermediate format for every conversion, whereas e.g. Image Alchemy
(at least that's what it seems to do) converts directly from one format
to the other. But I totally agree with Darrell that it's completely
useless to write conversion routines for GRASS where there are several
packages around that do that kind of stuff; maybe we should try to
convince the authors of the other packages to include an export option to
GRASS.
It would certainly be good if someone could write some
generic routines and send them the handmade software and
what's his name (author of xv). However, I am unaware
of any public domain "one step, all purpose" converters
(neither xv or alchemy are PD).
The disk space problem could be minimized if an r.in.ppm command
worked on stdin. Then, if users would find it simpler, a bunch of
scripts could be written for specific formats (e.g.,
#!/bin/sh
# r.in.gif (sans bells and whistles)
giftoppm $1 | r.in.ppm -
exit
)
[disclaimer - I haven't had a chance to look at the contrib
program that (Brown?) mentioned earlier - maybe it already
does this.]
I've been considering this feature (being able to accept data
from stdin) for site programs.