EuroBridge Widget Set (Version 2.2)
Major changes from previous version (2.1): A first version of the new XeFrame constraint widget class (modelled after ODA frame layout object), more bug fixes to the XeTexEd widget and relative size change control sequence, XeRaster has hooks for RLE format (thans to Jim Barber <barberjd@cs.curtin.edu.au>). The input for the most of widgets can also be given as pipe (contentFilter resource). For a more detailed list of changes, see CHANGELOG and BUGS.
The demonstration programs have been changed to use XeFrame instead of the Athena paned widget.
There is no new documentation file, the old Xew-2.1.ps.gz is still the latest. A temporary documentation about XeFrame resources is included in HTML format in Xew/Frame.html.
EuroBridge Widget Set is planned to contain a set of data presentation widgets. Each widget is a container for an information which can be imported into the widget in one of the specified interchange formats (ISO 2022/ANSI/ISO 8859-1 Text, JPEG/JIF, TIFF, G.711, H.261, MPEG, ODA/ODIF, etc). The work on this set is being done for the needs of the RACE project R2008 (EuroBridge), but as it relies heavily on the freely available existing software from the net, it has been decided that this widget set will also be freely usable.
Currently Text, Raster, Video and Audio (Sun specific!) have an implementation.
Xew has been compiled on following configurations:
SunIPX SunOS 4.1.3 X11R5,R6 Gnu C 2.5.8 (ANSI C) SunIPX(*) SunOS 4.1.3 openwin cc Sun (Sparc) Solaris 2.3 openwin Gnu C 2.5.8 HP 9000/750(*) HPUX 8.07 X11R5 HP CC (K&R C) HP 9000/750 HPUX 9.x X11R5 HP CC (also with ANSI C) Apollo DN3500 SR10.2 X11R4 Apollo C 6.6 (almost ANSI C) IBM RS6000(*) 3.2? ? ? DEC Alpha(*) DEC/OSF1 v1.2 X11R5 DEC C for OSF/1 AXP (ANSI C)
It should compile in other environments, but Imakefiles may require more or less tuning. The (*) configurations have only been tested with earlier releases.
Required packages:
Xew-2.2.tar.gz Xew source code (including simple test progs)
Optional addons:
Xew-2.1.ps.gz The Widget documentation tiff.v3.2.tar.Z Sam Leffler's TIFF library (tifflib-3.2beta?) jpegsrc.v4.tar.Z Independent JPEG group JPEG library urt-3.1b.tar.Z (?) Utah Raster Toolkit
The widget library contains five basic widgets: Text, TextEd, Raster, Audio and Video and a constraint widget Frame. Audio and Video still have a very limited implementation. There is also a stub for Geometric widget, which currently does not do anything (see the Xew-2.1.ps documentation for the details).
The package includes simple sample programs which demonstrate the basics of the widgets. The program 'viewer' activates a Xew widget(s) into Athena Porthole widget and controls it with Athena Panner widget (X11R5 required, uses Viewport for X11R4). 'simple' activates the widget(s) into separate shells and doesn't have any controls. 'texted' is a raw low level interface to the XeTextEd widget and can be used to test the features. The program 'audio' demonstrates use of Audio widget (Audio widget has driver only for Sun SPARC /dev/audio). 'video' is similar to 'audio', but plays MPEG stream.
Final comments
There is room for many optimizations. The Video widget is currently just a "proof of concept", that it can be done. It is slower than the original Berkeley mpeg_play (for fastest responce you have to disable dithering and select colorMode=gray). [Warning: Video does not support TrueColor or DirectColor visuals.] TextEd widget is not intended for large text contents, the response time in editing is directly proportional to the length of the content.
If you retrieve this software and have any difficulties in getting it to work, don't hesitate to mail me, even if you solved the problem. I am more than eager to fix all bugs that are found, if I only can. All portability issues are of interest also. If you have any wishes about new features and support, give me a hint and I may implement it.
Mail comments to Markku.Savela@vtt.fi