xli displays images in an X11 window or loads them onto
the root window. See the IMAGE TYPES section below for
supported image types.
If the filename stdin is given, xli will read the image
from standard input.
If the destination display cannot support the number of colors in the
image, the image will be dithered (monochrome destination) or have its
colormap reduced (color destination) as appropriate. This can also be
done forcibly with the -halftone, -dither, and
-colors options.
A variety of image manipulations can be specified, including gamma
correction, brightening, clipping, dithering, depth-reduction,
rotation, and zooming. Most of these manipulations have simple
implementations; speed was opted for above accuracy.
If you are viewing a large image in a window, the initial window will
be at most 90% of the size of the display unless the window manager
does not correctly handle window size requests or if you've used the
-fullscreen or -fillscreen options.
You may move the image around in the window
by dragging with the first mouse button. The cursor will indicate
which directions you may drag, if any.
When the keyboard focus is in the window you can:
Type 'q' or '^C' to exit xli.
Type space, 'n' or 'f' to move to the next image in the list.
Type 'b' or 'p' to move to the previous image in the list.
Type . to reload the image.
Type l to rotate the image anti-clockwise.
Type r to rotate the image clockwise.
Type 0 to set the images assumed gamma to your display gamma
(usually darkens images)
Type 1 to set the images assumed gamma to 1.0
(usually lightens images)
Type 5-2 to lighten the image (5 in small steps, up to 2 in large steps)
Type 6-9 to darken the image (6 in small steps, up to 9 in large steps)
A wide variety of common image manipulations can be done by mixing and
matching the available options. See the section entitled HINTS FOR
GOOD IMAGE DISPLAYS for some ideas.
Xsetbg is equivalent to xli -onroot -quiet and
xview is equivalent to xli -view -verbose.
RESOURCE CLASS
xli uses the resource class name _XSETROOT_IdFR for
window managers which need this resource set.
GLOBAL OPTIONS
The following options affect the global operation of xli.
They may be specified anywhere on the command line.
-default
Set the root background to the default root weave. This is the same
as xsetroot with no arguments.
-debug
Talk to the X server in synchronous mode. This is useful for
debugging. If an X error is seen while in this mode, a core will be
dumped.
-dumpcore
Signals will not be trapped, and instead a coredump will occur.
-display display_name
X11 display name to send the image(s) to.
-dispgamma Display_gamma
Specify the gamma correction value appropriate for the display device.
This overides the value read from the environment variable DISPLAY_GAMMA,
or the default value of 2.2, which is approximately correct for
many displays. A value of between 1.6 and 2.8 is reasonable. If individual
images are too bright or dark, use the -gamma option.
There is an image provided with xli called 'chkgamma.jpg' that lets you
set the display gamma reasonably accurately. This file contains two
grayscale ramps. The ramps are chosen to look linear to the human
eye, one using continuous tones, and the other using dithering.
When the display gamma is correct, then the two ramps should look symmetrical,
and the point at which they look equally bright should be almost exactly half
way from the top to the bottom. (To find this point it helps if you move away
a little from the screen, and de-focus your eyes a bit.)
If the equal brightness point is above center increase the
gamma, and decrease it if it is below the center. The value
will usually be around 2.2 Once you've got it right, you can set
the DISPLAY_GAMMA environment variable in your .profile
-fillscreen
Use the whole screen for displaying an image. The image will be zoomed
so that it just fits the size of the screen. If -onroot is also specified,
it will be zoomed to completely fill the screen.
-fit
Force image to use the default visual and colormap. This is useful if
you do not want technicolor effects when the colormap focus is inside
the image window, but it may reduce the quality of the displayed
image. This is on by default if -onroot or -windowid is specified.
-fork
Fork xli. This causes xli to disassociate itself from
the shell. This option automatically turns on -quiet.
-fullscreen
Use the whole screen for displaying an image. The image will be surrounded by
a border if it is smaller than the screen. If -onroot is also specified,
the image will be zoomed so that it just fits the size of the screen.
-geometry WxH[{+-X}{+-}Y]
This sets the size of the window onto which the images are loaded to a
different value than the size of the image. When viewing an image in
a window, this can be used to set the size and position of the
viewing window.
If the size is not specified in the geometry, (or is set to 0),
then the size will be chosen to be small enough to able to fit
the window in the screen (as usual).
-goto image_name
When the end of the list of images is reached, go to image
image_name. This is useful for generating looped slideshows.
If more than one image of the same name as the target exists on the
argument list, the first in the argument list is used.
-help [option ...]
Give information on an option or list of options. If no option is
given, a simple interactive help facility is invoked.
-identify
Identify the supplied images rather than display them.
-install
Forcibly install the images colormap when the window is focused.
This violates ICCCM standards and only exists to allow operation with
naive window managers. Use this option only if your window manager
does not install colormaps properly.
-list
List the images which are along the image path.
-onroot
Load image(s) onto the root window instead of viewing in a window.
This option automatically sets the -fit option.
This is the opposite of -view. XSetbg has this option set
by default. If used in conjunction with -fullscreen,
the image will be zoomed to just fit. If used with -fillscreen, the image will
be zoomed to completely fill the screen. -border, -at, and -center also affect the
results.
-path
Displays the image path and image suffixes which will be used when
looking for images. These are loaded from ~/.xlirc and
optionally from a system wide file (normally /usr/lib/xlirc).
-pixmap
Force the use of a pixmap as backing-store. This is provided for
servers where backing-store is broken (such as some versions of the
AIXWindows server). It may improve scrolling performance on servers
which provide backing-store.
-private
Force the use of a private colormap. Normally colors are allocated
shared unless there are not enough colors available.
-quiet
Forces xli and xview to be quiet. This is the
default for xsetbg, but the others like to whistle.
-supported
List the supported image types.
-verbose
Causes xli to be talkative, telling you what kind of
image it's playing with and any special processing that it has to do.
This is the default for xview and xli.
-version
Print the version number and patchlevel of this version of
xli.
-view
View image(s) in a window. This is the opposite of -onroot and
the default for xview and xli.
-visual visual_name
Force the use of a specific visual type to display an image. Normally
xli tries to pick the best available image for a
particular image type. The available visual types are: DirectColor,
TrueColor, PseudoColor, StaticColor, GrayScale, and StaticGray.
Nonconflicting names may be abbreviated and case is ignored.
-windowid hex_window_id
Sets the background pixmap of a particular window ID. The argument
must be in hexadecimal and must be preceded by "0x" (eg
-windowid 0x40000b. This is intended for setting the background
pixmap of some servers which use untagged virtual roots
(eg HP-VUE), but can have other interesting applications.
PERSISTENT IMAGE OPTIONS
The following options may precede each image. They take effect from
the next image, and continue until overridden or canceled with
-newoptions.
-border color
This sets the background portion of the window or clipped image which is
not covered by any images to be color.
-brighten percentage
Specify a percentage multiplier for a color images colormap. A value
of more than 100 will brighten an image, one of less than 100 will
darken it.
-colors n
Specify the maximum number of colors to use in the image. This is a
way to forcibly reduce the depth of an image.
-cdither
-colordither
Dither the image with a Floyd-Steinberg dither if the number of colors is reduced.
This will be slow, but will give a better looking result with a restricted color
set. -cdither and -colordither are equivalent.
-delay secs
Sets xli to automatically advance to the following image,
secs seconds after the next image file is displayed.
-dither
Dither a color image to monochrome using a Floyd-Steinberg dithering
algorithm. This happens by default when viewing color images on a
monochrome display. This is slower than -halftone and affects
the image accuracy but usually looks much better.
-gamma Image_gamma
Specify the gamma of the display the image was intended to be displayed on.
Images seem to
come in two flavors: 1) linear color images, produced by ray tracers,
scanners etc. These sort of images generally look too dark when displayed
directly to a CRT display. 2) Images that have been processed to look right
on a typical CRT display without any sort of processing. These images have
been 'gamma corrected'. By default, xli assumes that 8 bit images have
been gamma corrected and need no other processing. 24 bit images are assumed
to be linear.
If a linear image is displayed as if it is gamma corrected it will look too
dark, and a gamma value of 1.0 should be specified, so that xli can correct
the image for the CRT display device. If a gamma corrected image is displayed
as if it were a linear image, then it will look too light, and a gamma value of
(approximately) 2.2 should be specified for that image.
Some formats (RLE) allow the image gamma to be embedded as a comment in the
file itself, and the -gamma option allows overriding of the file comment.
In general, values smaller than 2.2 will lighten the image, and values
greater than 2.2 will darken the image.
In general this will work better than the -brighten option.
-gray
Convert an image to grayscale. This is very useful when displaying
colorful images on servers with limited color capability. The
optional spelling -grey may also be used.
-idelay secs
Set the delay to be used for this image to secs seconds (see
-delay). If -delay was specified, this overrides it. If
it was not specified, this sets the automatic advance delay for this
image while others will wait for the user to advance them.
-smooth
Smooth a color image. This reduces blockiness after zooming an image
up. If used on a monochrome image, nothing happens. This option can
take awhile to perform, especially on large images. You may specify
more than one -smooth option per image, causing multiple
iterations of the smoothing algorithm.
-title window_title
Set the titlebar of the window used to display the image.
This will overide any title that is read from the image
file. The title will also be used for the icon name.
-xpm color_context_key
Select the prefered xpm colour map. XPM files may contain more than one
color mapping, each mapping being appropriate for a particular visual.
Normally xli will select an apropriate color mapping from that supported
by the XPM file by checking on the default X visual class and depth.
This option allows the user to overide this choice.
Legal values of color_context_key are: m, g4, g and c.
m = mono, g4 = 4 level gray, g = gray, c = color ).
-xzoom percentage
Zoom the X axis of an image by percentage. A number greater
than 100 will expand the image, one smaller will compress it. A zero
value will be ignored. This option, and the related -yzoom are
useful for correcting the aspect ratio of images to be displayed.
-yzoom percentage
Zoom the Y axis of an image by percentage. See -xzoom for
more information.
-zoom percentage
Zoom both the X and Y axes by percentage. See -xzoom for
more information. Technically the percentage actually zoomed is the
square of the number supplied since the zoom is to both axes, but I
opted for consistency instead of accuracy.
-newoptions
Reset options that propagate. The -bright, -colors, -colordither, -delay,
-dither, -gamma, -gray, -normalize, -smooth, -xzoom, -yzoom, and
-zoom options normally propagate to all following images.
LOCAL IMAGE OPTIONS
The following options may precede each image. These options are
local to the image they precede.
-at X,Y
Indicates coordinates to load the image at X,Y on the base image.
If this is an option to the first image, and the -onroot option is
specified, the image will be loaded at the given location on the
display background.
-background color
Use color as the background color instead of the default
(usually white but this depends on the image type) if you are
transferring a monochrome image to a color display.
-center
Center the image on the base image loaded. If this is an option to
the first image, and the -onroot option is specified, the image
will be centered on the display background.
-clip X,Y,W,H
Clip the image before loading it. X and Y define the
upper-left corner of the clip area, and W and H define the
extents of the area. A zero value for W or H will be
interpreted as the remainder of the image.
Note that X and Y may be negative, and that W and H
may be larger than the image. This causes a border to be placed around the
image. The border color may be set with the -border option.
-expand
Forces the image (after all other optional processing) to be expanded
into a True Color (24 bit) image. This is useful on systems which support
24 bit color, but where xli might choose to load a bitmap or 8 bit image
into one of the other smaller depth visuals supported on your system.
-foreground color
Use color as the foreground color instead of black if you are
transferring a monochrome image to a color display. This can also be
used to invert the foreground and background colors of a monochrome
image.
-halftone
Force halftone dithering of a color image when displaying on a
monochrome display. This option is ignored on monochrome images.
This dithering algorithm blows an image up by sixteen times; if you
don't like this, the -dither option will not blow the image up
but will take longer to process and will be less accurate.
-invert
Inverts a monochrome image. This is shorthand for -foreground
white -background black.
-merge
Merge this image onto the base image after local processing. The base
image is considered to be the first image specified or the last image
that was not preceded by -merge. If used in conjunction with
-at and -clip, very complex images can be built up.
Note that the final image will be the size of the first image, and that
subsequent merged images overlay previous images. The final image size
can be altered by using the -clip option on the base image to
make it bigger or smaller.
This option is on by default for all images if the -onroot or
-windowid options are specified.
-name image_name
Force the next argument to be treated as an image name. This is
useful if the name of the image is -dither, for instance.
-normalize
Normalize a color image.
-rotate degrees
Rotate the image by degrees clockwise. The number must be a
multiple of 90.
EXAMPLES
To load the rasterfile "my.image" onto the background and replicate
it to fill the entire background:
xli -onroot my.image
To load a monochrome image "my.image" onto the background, using red
as the foreground color, replicate the image, and overlay
"another.image" onto it at coordinate (10,10):
xli -foreground red my.image -at 10,10 another.image
To center the rectangular region from 10 to 110 along the X axis and
from 10 to the height of the image along the Y axis:
xli -center -clip 10,10,100,0 my.image
To double the size of an image:
xli -zoom 200 my.image
To halve the size of an image:
xli -zoom 50 my.image
To brighten a dark image:
xli -brighten 150 my.image
To darken a bright image:
xli -brighten 50 my.image
HINTS FOR GOOD IMAGE DISPLAYS
Since images are likely to come from a variety of sources, they may be
in a variety of aspect ratios which may not be supported by your
display. The -xzoom and -yzoom options can be used to
change the aspect ratio of an image before display. If you use these
options, it is recommended that you increase the size of one of the
dimensions instead of shrinking the other, since shrinking looses
detail. For instance, many GIF and G3 FAX images have an X:Y ratio of
about 2:1. You can correct this for viewing on a 1:1 display with
either -xzoom 50 or -yzoom 200 (reduce X axis to 50% of
its size and expand Y axis to 200% of its size, respectively) but the
latter should be used so no detail is lost in the conversion.
When zooming color images up you can reduce blockiness with
-smooth. For zooms of 300% or more, I recommend two smoothing
passes (although this can take awhile to do on slow machines). There
will be a noticeable improvement in the image.
You can perform image processing on a small portion of an image by
loading the image more than once and using the -merge, -at
and -clip options. Load the image, then merge it with a
clipped, processed version of itself. To brighten a 100x100 rectangular
portion of an image located at (50,50), for instance, you could type:
If you're using a display with a small colormap to display colorful
images, try using the -gray option to convert to grayscale.
XLITO
xlito (XLoadImageTrailingOptions) is a separate utility that provides
a file format independent way of marking image files with the appropriate
options to display correctly. It does this by appending to file a string
specified by the user, marked with some magic numbers so that this string
can be extracted by a program that knows where to look. Since almost all
image files have some sort of image size specifier, the programs that
load or manipulate these files do not look beyond the point at which
they have read the image, so trailing information can safely be appended
to the file. If appending this information causes trouble with other
utilities, it can simply be deleted.
xli will recognize these trailing options at the end
of the image files, and will treat the embedded string as if it were
a sequence of command line IMAGE OPTIONS. Any GLOBAL OPTIONS
will be ignored, and the IMAGE OPTIONS are never propagated to
other images.
Trailing options can be examined with:
xlito image_file ...
Changed or added with:
xlito -c "string of options" image_file
And deleted with:
xlito -d image_file ...
For example, if you have a gif file fred.gif which is too dark and is the
wrong aspect ratio, then it may need to be viewed with:
xli -yzoom 130 -gamma 1.0 fred.gif
to get it to look OK. These options can then be appended to the file by:
xlito -c "-yzoom 130 -gamma 1.0" fred.gif
and from then on xli will get the appropriate options from the
image file itself. See the xlito manual entry for more details
about this utility.
PATHS AND EXTENSIONS
The file ~/.xlirc (and optionally a system-wide file) defines
the path and default extensions that xli will use when
looking for images. This file can have two statements: "path=" and
"extension=" (the equals signs must follow the word with no spaces
between). Everything following the "path=" keyword will be prepended
to the supplied image name if the supplied name does not specify an
existing file. The paths will be searched in the order they are
specified. Everything following the "extension=" keyword will be
appended to the supplied image name if the supplied name does not
specify an existing file. As with paths, these extensions will be
searched in the order they are given. Comments are any portion of a
line following a hash-mark (#).
The following is a sample ~/.xlirc file:
# paths to look for images in
path= /usr/local/images
/home/usr1/guest/madd/images
/usr/include/X11/bitmaps
# default extensions for images; .Z is automatic; scanned in order
extension= .csun .msun .sun .face .xbm .bm
Versions of xli prior to version 01, patchlevel 03 would
load the system-wide file (if any), followed by the user's file. This
behavior made it difficult for the user to configure her environment
if she didn't want the default. Newer versions will ignore the
system-wide file if a personal configuration file exists.
IMAGE TYPES
xli currently supports the following image types:
CMU Window Manager raster files
Faces Project images
Fuzzy Bitmap (.fbm) images
GEM bit images
GIF images (Including GIF89a compatibility)
G3 FAX images
JFIF style jpeg images
McIDAS areafiles
MacPaint images
Windows, OS/2 RLE Image
Monochrome PC Paintbrush (.pcx) images
Photograph on CD Image
Portable Bitmap (.pbm, .pgm, .ppm) images
Sun monochrome rasterfiles
Sun color RGB rasterfiles
Targa (.tga) files
Utah Raster Toolkit (.rle) files
X pixmap (.xpm) files (Version 1, 2C and 3)
X10 bitmap files
X11 bitmap files
X Window Dump (except TrueColor and DirectColor)
Normal, compact, and raw PBM images are supported. Both standard and
run-length encoded Sun rasterfiles are supported. Any image whose
name ends in .Z is assumed to be a compressed image and will be
filtered through "uncompress". If HAVE_GUNZIP is defined in the
Makefile.std make file, then any image whose name ends in
Any file that looks like a uuencoded file will be decoded
automatically.
For a more-or-less complete list of other contributors (there are a
lot of them), please see the README file enclosed with the
distribution.
FILES
xli - the image loader and viewer
xsetbg - pseudonym which quietly sets the background
xview - pseudonym which views in a window
xlito - the trailing options utility
/usr/lib/X11/Xli - default system-wide configuration file
~/.xlirc - user's personal configuration file
COPYRIGHT
Copyright (c) 1989, 1990, 1991, 1992, 1993 Jim Frost, Graeme Gill and others.
Xli is copywritten material with a very loose copyright
allowing unlimited modification and distribution if the copyright
notices are left intact. Various portions are copywritten by various
people, but all use a modification of the MIT copyright notice.
Please check the source for complete copyright information. The
intent is to keep the source free, not to stifle its distribution, so
please write to me if you have any questions.
BUGS
Zooming dithered images, especially downwards, is UGLY.
Images can come in a variety of aspect ratios. Xli cannot
detect what aspect ratio the particular image being loaded has, nor
the aspect ratio of the destination display, so images with differing
aspect ratios from the destination display will appear distorted. The solution
to this is to use xlito to append the appropriate options to the
image file. See HINTS FOR GOOD IMAGE DISPLAYS and XLITO for more
information.
The GIF format allows more than one image to be stored in a single GIF
file, but xli will only display the first.
One of the pseudonyms for xli, xview, is the same
name as Sun uses for their SunView-under-X package. This will be
confusing if you're one of those poor souls who has to use Sun's
XView.
Some window managers do not correctly handle window size requests. In
particular, many versions of the twm window manager use
the MaxSize hint instead of the PSize hint, causing images which
are larger than the screen to display in a window larger than the
screen, something which is normally avoided. Some versions of twm
also ignore the MaxSize argument's real function, to limit the maximum
size of the window, and allow the window to be resized larger than the
image. If this happens, xli merely places the image in
the upper-left corner of the window and uses the zero-value'ed pixel
for any space which is not covered by the image. This behavior is
less-than-graceful but so are window managers which are cruel enough
to ignore such details.
The order in which operations are performed on an image is independent
of the order in which they were specified on the command line.
Wherever possible I tried to order operations in such a way as to look
the best possible (zooming before dithering, for instance) or to
increase speed (zooming downward before compressing, for instance).
Display Gamma should setable in the ~/.xlirc file.
Embedded trailing options overide the command line Image Options. Command
line options should really overide trailing options.
