© 1999 Michael J. Hammel

Superficie 0.5
Graphic Counter Language 2.20.3.D
MathMap
Panorama Tools v1.7.2
GIMP 1.1.5
Gimp ImageMap Plug-In Release 0.9
DiaCanvas 0.10
tgif 4.1.9
Swift Generator 0.7.
Giram 0.0.17
Install-Webserver 0.1
povfront 0.9-2
Wacom Driver for XFree86 alpha 3
xfsft 1.1.5
XawTV 2.44
RenderDotC 3.1
Terraform 0.3.1
AleVT 1.4.5

Disclaimer: Before I get too far into this I should note that any of the news items I post in this section are just that - news. Either I happened to run across them via some mailing list I was on, via some Usenet newsgroup, or via email from someone. I'm not necessarily endorsing these products (some of which may be commercial), I'm just letting you know I'd heard about them in the past month.

Superficie 0.5
Juan Pablo - May 17th 1999, 07:19 EST

Superficie (surface) is a little program for viewing and doing basic manipulation of 3D surfaces. It reads a file with the data, and displays the object in a window, so you can interact with it.

Changes: Improved autoconf scripts, bug fixes, mathematica package, etc.
http://www.linuxsupportline.com/~superficie/

Graphic Counter Language 2.20.3.D
G. Adam Stanislav - May 17th 1999, 07:37 EST

GCL is a new CGI programming language that allows webmasters to create fully customized web counters in as few as 15-20 lines of code. The webmaster provides images for the digits in gif, xbm, or gd format, plus optional comma, head, tail, and background images. The webmaster can choose how the various elements that will comprise the final graphic counter are aligned. As of version 2.10, the webmaster may compile images directly to the binary executable.

Changes: 64-bit counter size allowing the count to go up to trillions and a faster lexical analyzer.
http://www.whizkidtech.net/gcl/

MathMap

MathMap is a GIMP plug-in which allows distortion of images specified by mathematical formulae. For each pixel in the generated image, an expression is evaluated which should return a pixel value. The expression can either refer to a pixel in the source image or can generate pixels completely independent of the source. MathMap not only allows the generation of still images but also of animations.

The MathMap homepage can be found at

> http://www.unix.cslab.tuwien.ac.at/~schani/mathmap/

It includes a user's manual as well as screenshots and examples.
Mark Probst
Student, Programmer

Panorama Tools v1.7.2

Panorama Tools is a free program which can be used to generate, edit and transform many kinds of panoramic images. Its five main functionalities are:

- Correction of images.

- Automatic cropping of images to brightest rectangle.
- Remove all sorts of barrel and/or pincussion distortion.
- Correct light fall-off at edges of your wide angle shots.
- Correct chromatic errors (colour separation) of your lens.
- Correct chromatic errors (colour separation) of your scanner.
- Skew/Unskew your images horizontally or vertically.
- Correction of scanning slit cameras.

- Perspective Control

- Simulates a shift lens in software
- For normal and fisheye lenses

- Remap from any projection to any projection

- Warp and unwarp normal, panoramic and fisheye images.
- Convert equirectangular LivePicture panoramas to QTVR-panoramas and vice-versa.
- Convert mirror images (BeHere-setup or similar) to any panorama and vice-versa. Convert fisheye images to any panorama and vice-versa
- Unwarp panorama sections (QTVR, LivePicture, or VRML-cubes) to edit in GIMP, then rewarp and seamlessly insert back.

- Adjust images into a panoramic view

- Generate full panoramic view using any mixture of normal, fisheye and panoramic images.
- Built-in optimizer to find optimum pitch/roll/yaw for a given image to fit a panorama
- Built-in optimizer to find optimum correction settings for a given image.
- Built-in stitching tool to automatically merge images into a panoramic view.
- Automatic colour adjustment of to be merged images
- Extract any view (normal/fisheye/panoramic) from any panorama (RealVR/QTVR/rectilinear/VRML-cubes)
- Insert any image (normal/fisheye/panoramic) into any panorama (RealVR/QTVR/rectilinearVRML-cubes)

- Realtime Panorama Editor

- The realtime Panorama Editor is a separate Plug-in which makes the GIMP window an editable VR-viewer. You can pan left and right, tilt up and down, and zoom in and out. At any time you can use all GIMP tools to edit the image and instantly apply the changes to the warped panoramic image while keeping the interactive window open. This can be done with any view ("camera") and any panorama (see 'adjust' above).

H. Dersch
-------------------------------------
Spherical Panoramas, Macro Panoramas,
Free Panorama Software:
<http://www.fh-furtwangen.de/~dersch>

GIMP 1.1.5

ftp://ftp.gimp.org/pub/gimp/unstable/v1.1.5/
GTK+ 1.2.x is required. Grab it at: ftp://ftp.gimp.org/pub/gtk/v1.2/

What's new? Lots.

- Many UI changes, including revamped tool options and togglable tools
- All the PDB wrappers in the app are autogenned by the pdbgen tool. There may be some brokenness as a result of this, please report problems to bugs@gimp.org
- Crop tool rework
- Persistant global parasites
- Some new plugins: rcm, gdyntext. Plug-in bugfixes
- OS/2 port merges
- Lots more stuff that I forgot, see ChangeLog

-Yosh

Gimp ImageMap Plug-In Release 0.9

Release 0.9 of my plug-in for the creation of clickable imagemaps is now available on my homepage: http://home-2.consunet.nl/~cb007736 . This release contains new functionality (List of standard prefixes in settings dialog, better handling of invalid input, 'view source' dialog for easy copy/paste to other programs, etc.) and some cosmetic bugfixes.

This is the last release before 1.0. Version 1.0 will basically be the same as 0.9 but with all (?) bugs removed. Any volunteers for seriously beta testing this release?

Maurits Rijk
lpeek.mrijk@consunet.nl

DiaCanvas 0.10.

It's a generalization of the very nice canvas used by the drawing tool DIA. It is about to offer the same features, only at a more generic way. It's much more GTK oriented than the original DIA.

You can find it at:
http://web.inter.nl.net/hcc/klem

I know it's not perfect at all, but it will give a nice impression of what it's suposed to be.
Arjan Molenaar
arjan@inter.nl.net

tgif 4.1.9
Bill Cheng - May 20th 1999, 10:50 EST

tgif is a vector-based draw tool, with the additional benefit of being sort of a web-browser. That is, you can fetch drawings from a web server with it, and you can make objects in your picture into hotlinks to other parts of the drawing, or to other drawings accessible via http.

Changes: Fixed a few bugs and added a new X default, Tgif.PSFontAliases to allow fake font names in Tgif.AdditionalFonts. Using this X default, different encodings of the same PS font can be used. Also added 3 new internal commands: set_allow_interrupt(), size_named_obj_absolute(), and get_named_obj_bbox().
http://bourbon.cs.umd.edu:8001/tgif/

Swift Generator 0.7.1
Olivier Debon - May 23rd 1999, 17:45 EST

Swift-Generator is a utility 'ala' Macromedia Generator. It aims at dynamically replacing texts, fonts, sounds and movie clips in either Template Generator files or standard Flash files. This allows Webmasters to create dynamic content such as stock tickers, news tickers, weather forecasts and the like.

Changes: Serious bug fixed.
http://www.swift-tools.com/

Giram 0.0.17
David Odin - May 26th 1999, 22:38 EST

Giram Is Really A Modeller. It is a multi-purpose 3D modeller written with the GTK+ User interface v1.2. It can load and save POV-Ray and AutoCAD DXF sources files. Some basic modelling tools are already there and it is growing very fast.

Changes: Better and easier to use Plugins interface, better support for DXF, Giram can now export in S3D format, rotation can now be restrained to fixed angles, as well as various bugfixes.
http://www.minet.net/giram/

Install-Webserver 0.1
Donncha O Caoimh - May 26th 1999, 22:34 EST

Install-Webserver will install Apache, PHP and MySQL for you. All you have to do is run one script.

Changes: First release.
http://members.xoom.com/xeer/

Editors Note: It's not graphics, but it is web based and for people like me, could be very useful for testing things on my local box before uploading to my remote web server.

povfront 0.9-2
Philippe P.E. DAVID - May 26th 1999, 22:32 EST

PovFront is a front-end for POVray ray tracing engine. It manages all the available options as well as the script only ones. It provides multiple rendering possibility and trace of them. It will provide network rendering in the future.

Changes: This is intended to be the last version before 1.0. The next major version will introduce network rendering.
http://perso.club-internet.fr/clovis1/

Wacom Driver for XFree86 alpha 3
Fred - May 26th 1999, 09:34 EST

This is an XFree86 XInput driver for Wacom tablets. It handles wacom IV and V protocols.

Changes: Corrected lens cursor support for Intuos models.
http://www.lepied.com/xfree86/

xfsft 1.1.5
Ross_Campbell - May 25th 1999, 17:05 EST

The Xfsft patches to X11R6 enable X11 servers (including XFree86) and the font server xfs to use TrueType fonts and improves on the way X11 handles international scalable fonts.

Changes: This version fixes a bug in the previous version and includes a version of mkfontdir that causes it to automatically build `encodings.dir' files.
http://www.dcs.ed.ac.uk/home/jec/programs/xfsft/

XawTV 2.44
funnyguy - May 25th 1999, 12:59 EST

XawTV is a simple Xaw-based TV program which uses the bttv driver or video4linux. It contains various command-line utilities for grabbing images and avi movies, for tuning in TV stations, etc. A grabber driver for vic and a radio application (needs KDE) for the boards with radio support are included as well.

Changes: fbtv: added -q switch, started lirc support , changed float to double for X resources, fixed the radio programs, webcam bugfix.
http://www.in-berlin.de/User/kraxel/xawtv.html

RenderDotC 3.1
Emil Mikulic - May 25th 1999, 12:01 EST

RenderDotC (RDC) is a photorealistic rendering toolkit which adheres to the RenderMan(R) standard. Using the Reyes architecture, RDC supports advanced capabilities such as motion blur, depth of field, trim curves, texture/environment/displacement mapping, and programmable shading in the RenderMan Shading Language. The shader compiler included in the toolkit compiles shaders all the way to machine language for the highest possible performance.

Changes: Now available for Linux
http://www.dotcsw.com

Terraform 0.3.1
RNG - May 25th 1999, 11:43 EST

Terraform allows you to create fractal terrain (also called a height field) and transform it using a number of algorithms. It is meant to be a tool for those who want to generate digital terrain models for use in raytracing or other simulations. Terraform features different views and colormaps and has a preview mode which features interactive real-time rotation of the terrain object. Terraform is written using Gtk-- (the C++ wrapper for Gtk+).

Changes: Better dialogs, faster 2D redraw, lots of bug fixes, and some internal code changes
http://www.peoplesoft.com/peoplepages/g/robert_gasch/terraform/

AleVT 1.4.5
froese - May 25th 1999, 11:03 EST

AleVT is an X11 teletext/videotext decoder and browser for the bttv driver. It features multiple windows, a page cache, regexp searching, built-in manual, and more. Also included is a program to get the time from teletext.
http://user.exit.de/froese/

© 1999 by Michael J. Hammel