I *think* that AWT means "abstract windowing toolkit", but I'm not sure. AWT was the first Java GUI controls package, prior to Swing - it's been in place since Java 1.0, I think.
I'm not saying that PNG is a bad choice - just that JPEGs are smaller and - I think - are more widely used than PNGs, especially where image fidelity is not a huge issue...
Chris On Nov 14, 2010, at 10:17 AM, John J. Boyer wrote:
Thanks, as usual. PNG was chosen because it seemed more suitable for representing tactile graphics. Incidentally, what does awt mean? We'll have no lack of graphics packages anyway. John On Sun, Nov 14, 2010 at 10:00:31AM -0800, Chris von See wrote:Java has built-in classes for reading and manipulating graphics - takea look at the "java.awt", "java.awt.image" and "javax.imageio" packages in the JDK. You may need to use a bit of matrix math to do the transformations needed for rotation and scaling, but most image operations are not particularly difficult once you get the hang of using the classes. If you'd prefer, you can also call a utility such as ImageMagick to perform many operations; ImageMagick has Java bindings that are part of the JMagick project at Sourceforge(http://sourceforge.net/projects/jmagick/ ), or you can just spin off a separate process using standard Java facilities (java.lang.ProcessBuilderor java.lang.Runtime, plus java.lang.Process). A quick search also turned up the Apache Commons Sanselan project and the "java-image-scaling" project on Google Code. I've not used either of these tools personally. You may want to consider using JPEG instead of PNG for your image format. Because of its built-in compression a JPEG is considerably smaller than an equivalent PNG, and unless you're doing very fine- resolution work where you'd be concerned about even the slightest potential loss of data the JPEGs are more than equal to the task.NIMAS and DAISY support both JPEG and PNG, as well as SVG; if you wantto handle SVGs you should look at the Apache Batik project, the Inkscape tool or perhaps the Uniconverter project on Sourceforge, since the Java ImageIO classes won't handle vector graphics at all. Cheers Chris On Nov 14, 2010, at 7:37 AM, John J. Boyer wrote:Just as we will be using itex2MML so a user can enter math in TeX, wewill probably need some basic graphic manipulation ability, such as resizing, changing resulution, rotating, etc. We will probably be using PNG (Portable Network Graphics). Can such basic manipulation be handledwith the SWT widgets? If not, what Java library might do them and alsouse SWT? Thanks, John -- John J. Boyer; President, Chief Software Developer Abilitiessoft, Inc. http://www.abilitiessoft.com Madison, Wisconsin USA Developing software for people with disabilities-- John J. Boyer; President, Chief Software Developer Abilitiessoft, Inc. http://www.abilitiessoft.com Madison, Wisconsin USA Developing software for people with disabilities
