Prima::ImageViewer - standard image, icon, and bitmap viewer class.

The module contains Prima::ImageViewer class, which provides image displaying functionality, including different zoom levels.

Prima::ImageViewer is a descendant of Prima::ScrollWidget and inherits its document scrolling behavior and programming interface. See Prima::ScrollWidget for details.

alignment INTEGER

One of the following ta::XXX constants:

	ta::Left
	ta::Center 
	ta::Right

Selects the horizontal image alignment.

Default value: ta::Left

image OBJECT

Selects the image object to be displayed. OBJECT can be an instance of Prima::Image, Prima::Icon, or Prima::DeviceBitmap class.

imageFile FILE

Set the image FILE to be loaded and displayed. Is rarely used since does not return a loading success flag.

quality BOOLEAN

A boolean flag, selecting if the palette of image is to be copied into the widget palette, providing higher visual quality on paletted displays. See also palette in Prima::Widget.

Default value: 1

valignment INTEGER

One of the following ta::XXX constants:

	ta::Top
	ta::Middle or ta::Center
	ta::Bottom

Selects the vertical image alignment.

NB: ta::Middle value is not equal to ta::Center's, however the both constants produce equal effect here.

Default value: ta::Bottom

zoom FLOAT

Selects zoom level for image display. The acceptable value range is between 0.01 and 100. The zoom value is rounded to the closest value divisible by 1/zoomPrecision. For example, is zoomPrecision is 100, the zoom values will be rounded to the precision of hundredth - to fiftieth and twentieth fractional values - .02, .04, .05, .06, .08, and 0.1 . When zoomPrecision is 1000, the precision is one thousandth, and so on.

Default value: 1

zoomPrecision INTEGER

Zoom precision of zoom property. Minimal acceptable value is 10, where zoom will be rounded to 0.2, 0.4, 0.5, 0.6, 0.8 and 1.0 .

The reason behind this arithmetics is that when image of arbitrary zoom factor is requested to be displayed, the image sometimes must begin to be drawn from partial pixel - for example, 10x zoomed image shifted 3 pixels left, must be displayed so the first image pixel from the left occupies 7 screen pixels, and the next ones - 10 screen pixels. That means, that the correct image display routine must ask the system to draw the image at offset -3 screen pixels, where the first pixel column would correspond to that pixel.

When zoom factor is fractional, the picture is getting more complex. For example, with zoom factor 12.345, and zero screen offset, first image pixel begins at 12th screen pixel, the next - 25th ( because of the roundoff ), then 37th etc etc. Also, for example the image is 2000x2000 pixels wide, and is asked to be drawn so that the image appears shifted 499 screen image pixels left, beginning to be drawn from ~ 499/12.3456=40.42122 image pixel. Is might seem that indeed it would be enough to ask system to begin drawing from image pixel 40, and offset int(0.42122*12.345)=5 screen pixels to the left, however, that procedure will not account for the correct fixed point roundoff that accumulates as system scales the image. For zoom factor 12.345 this roundoff sequence is, as we seen before, (12,25,37,49,62,74,86,99,111,123) for first 10 pixels displayed, that occupy (12,13,12,12,13,12,12,13,12,12) screen pixels. For pixels starting at 499, this sequence is (506,519,531,543,556,568,580,593,605,617) offsets or (13,12,12,13,13,12,12,13,12,12) widths -- note the two subsequent 13s there. This sequence begins to repeat itself after 200 iterations (12.345*200=2469.000), which means that in order to achieve correct display results, the image must be asked to be displayed from image pixel 0 if image's first pixel on the screen is between 0 and 199 ( or for screen pixels 0-2468), from image pixel 200 for offsets 200-399, ( screen pixels 2469-4937), and so on.

Since system internally allocate memory for image scaling, that means that up to 2*200*min(window_width,image_width)*bytes_per_pixel unneccessary bytes will be allocated for each image drawing call (2 because the calculations are valid for both the vertical and horizontal strips), and this can lead to slowdown or even request failure when image or window dimensions are large. The proposed solution is to roundoff accepted zoom factors, so these offsets are kept small - for example, N.25 zoom factors require only max 1/.25=4 extra pixels. When zoomPrecision value is 100, zoom factors are rounded to 0.X2, 0.X4, 0.X5, 0.X6, 0.X8, 0.X0, thus requiring max 50 extra pixels.

NB. If, despite the efforts, the property gets in the way, increase it to 1000 or even 10000, but note that this may lead to problems.

Default value: 100

on_paint SELF, CANVAS

The Paint notification handler is mentioned here for the specific case of its return value, that is the return value of internal put_image call. For those who might be interested in put_image failures, that mostly occur when trying to draw an image that is too big, the following code might be useful:

    sub on_paint 
    {
        my ( $self, $canvas) = @_;
	warn "put_image() error:$@" unless $self-> SUPER::on_paint($canvas);
    }

screen2point X, Y, [ X, Y, ... ]

Performs translation of integer pairs integers as (X,Y)-points from widget coordinates to pixel offset in image coordinates. Takes in account zoom level, image alignments, and offsets. Returns array of same length as the input.

Useful for determining correspondence, for example, of a mouse event to a image point.

The reverse function is point2screen.

point2screen X, Y, [ X, Y, ... ]

Performs translation of integer pairs as (X,Y)-points from image pixel offset to widget image coordinates. Takes in account zoom level, image alignments, and offsets. Returns array of same length as the input.

Useful for determining a screen location of an image point.

The reverse function is screen2point.

watch_load_progress IMAGE

When called, image viewer watches as IMAGE is being loaded ( see load in Prima::Image ) and displays the progress. As soon as IMAGE begins to load, it replaces the existing image property. Example:

    $i = Prima::Image-> new;
    $viewer-> watch_load_progress( $i);
    $i-> load('huge.jpg');
    $viewer-> unwatch_load_progress;

Similar functionality is present in Prima::ImageDialog.

unwatch_load_progress CLEAR_IMAGE=1

Stops monitoring of image loading progress. If CLEAR_IMAGE is 0, the leftovers of the incremental loading stay intact in image propery. Otherwise, image is set to undef.

zoom_round ZOOM

Rounds the zoom factor to zoomPrecision precision, returns the rounded zoom value. The algorithm is the same as used internally in zoom property.

Dmitry Karasik, <dmitry@karasik.eu.org>.

Prima, Prima::Image, Prima::ScrollWidget, Prima::ImageDialog, examples/iv.pl.