Up: graphics resources

Viewing Images

The most basic thing to do with images is look at them. Since there are a wide variety of image file types, the Geometry Center has a wide variety of file viewers.

Geomview

The flagship of the Geometry Center viewers, geomview is a general purpose 3D viewer developed at the Center for for viewing geometric objects. Geomview displays objects described in OOGL, an Object Oriented Graphics Language also developed at the Center.

You can learn much more about geomview online.

PostScript

ghostview -- ghostview is an X windows PostScript viewer. Ghostview is actually a front end for the ghostscript PostScript interpreter. The program is mostly self explanatory, though there are many options explained in the man page.
Preview -- Preview.app is the NeXT PostScript previewer. It lives in /NextApps, and is also self-explanatory.

General Purpose Viewers

display -- display is an X based application which is part of ImageMagick, a public domain collection of image tools. Display can deal with almost all common image formats including gif, jpg, TIFF, SGI, FIT, PNM and many more. One can also invoke many image processing features from within display. Clicking on the image brings up a menu. There is online help, and a man page.
imgsee -- imgsee is a Geometry Center tool for displaying a wide variety of image types on SGI machines. It is quicker than the ImageMagick viewer, but it does less. For details, consult the man page.
OmniImage -- OnmiImage is an image viewer for the NeXT. It lives in /LocalApps. Because the NeXT uses 12 bit color instead of 24 bit, NeXT images are frequently inaccessible to other viewers. Note, you can use OmniImage to convert NeXT images to portable formats.

Animation Viewers

smovie -- smovie is an SGI tool for displaying a sequence of images. You can step through a frame at a time, loop and control various other options. You can also capture NTSC video input. To start smovie, you must specify a list of image files, that will become the frames of the animation.
Example: smovie frame*.gif
xanim -- xanim is a general purpose animation viewer that runs under X11. It handle a huge variety of formats, including FLI, FLC, DL, AVI, Quicktime and more.
mpeg_play -- mpeg_play is an X11 tool for playing MPEG movies. It is self explanatory, though the man page describes a number of technical options.
MPEG_play and Movie -- On NeXT machines, MPEG_play is the mpeg application and Movie is a TIFF animator. Both live in /LocalApps. MPEG_play requires mpeg files have extension .mpg, and it doesn't seem to work very well.
Sparkle and Movieplay -- Sparkle is the macintosh MPEG player, and Movieplay plays Quicktime animations. Both are available in the "Graphics Apps" folder under the apple menu.

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Comments to: webmaster@geom.umn.edu
Created: Fri Sep 8 11:39:00 1995 --- Last modified: Jun 18 1996