Xv (software)

Last updated
xv
Developer(s) John Bradley
Stable release
3.10a / December 29, 1994;29 years ago (1994-12-29)
Operating system Unix-like, VMS
Type Image viewer
License Shareware
Website www.trilon.com/xv/

xv is a shareware program written by John Bradley to display and modify digital images under the X Window System.

Contents

While popular in the early 1990s ("XV is widely considered to be the preeminent image viewer for the X Window System" [1] ), no official releases have been made since December 1994. Bradley was unable to negotiate the LZW patent licence necessary for encoding the then-popular GIF format. The patent has now expired, so this legal constraint is no longer relevant.

Until at least 2000, Bradley collected third-party updates to xv, for example, support for the PNG image format. These were published as source code patches only. Additional patches are still (as of 2024) created and maintained by volunteers. [2]

xv can be run from either the command line or through a graphical interface. It distinguishes itself from many other bitmap viewing and editing programs with a very efficient interface in which the user edits just the parameters of a fixed pipeline of processing steps, rather than modifying the bitmap directly in each operation. As a result, the user can easily undo operations (such as cropping, color modifications, filtering) out of order, rather than only being able to undo the respective last operation. While this concept limits what xv can do compared to some alternatives, the functionality it provides can be applied very conveniently and efficiently.

See also

Notes

  1. PNG: The Definitive Guide. O'Reilly. 1999. Retrieved August 11, 2011.
  2. xv on GitHub


Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Links (web browser)</span> Web browser

Links is a free software text and graphical web browser with a pull-down menu system. It renders complex pages, has partial HTML 4.0 support, supports color and monochrome terminals, and allows horizontal scrolling.

Object Linking & Embedding (OLE) is a proprietary technology developed by Microsoft that allows embedding and linking to documents and other objects. For developers, it brought OLE Control Extension (OCX), a way to develop and use custom user interface elements. On a technical level, an OLE object is any object that implements the IOleObject interface, possibly along with a wide range of other interfaces, depending on the object's needs.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Preview (macOS)</span> Image and PDF viewer software by Apple

Preview is the built-in image viewer and PDF viewer of the macOS operating system. In addition to viewing and printing digital images and Portable Document Format (PDF) files, it can also edit these media types. It employs the Aqua graphical user interface, the Quartz graphics layer, and the ImageIO and Core Image frameworks.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Microsoft Paint</span> Raster graphics editor

Paint is a simple raster graphics editor that has been included with all versions of Microsoft Windows. The program opens, modifies and saves image files in Windows bitmap (BMP), JPEG, GIF, PNG, and single-page TIFF formats. The program can be in color mode or two-color black-and-white, but there is no grayscale mode. For its simplicity and wide availability, it rapidly became one of the most used Windows applications, introducing many to painting on a computer for the first time.

Animated Portable Network Graphics (APNG) is a file format which extends the Portable Network Graphics (PNG) specification to permit animated images that work similarly to animated GIF files, while supporting 24-bit images and 8-bit transparency not available for GIFs. It also retains backward compatibility with non-animated PNG files.

A number of vector graphics editors exist for various platforms. Potential users of these editors will make a comparison of vector graphics editors based on factors such as the availability for the user's platform, the software license, the feature set, the merits of the user interface (UI) and the focus of the program. Some programs are more suitable for artistic work while others are better for technical drawings. Another important factor is the application's support of various vector and bitmap image formats for import and export.

xzgv is a simple, small software utility that can be used for viewing digital images or pictures of several formats, e.g., JPEG, GIF, PNG, etc. xzgv is used on computers using a Unix-like operating system and the X Window System. Because xzgv is a fast, lightweight image viewer that is compatible with a large number of image formats, the viewer is popular on older, slower, resource-challenged computer systems. xzgv is a standard utility in the Damn Small Linux distribution, for example.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Audacious (software)</span> Free and open source audio player

Audacious is a free and open-source audio player software with a focus on low resource use, high audio quality, and support for a wide range of audio formats. It is designed primarily for use on POSIX-compatible Unix-like operating systems, with limited support for Microsoft Windows. Audacious was the default audio player in Ubuntu Studio in 2011–12, and was the default music player in Lubuntu until October 2018, when it was replaced with VLC.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Poppler (software)</span> Free library for creating PDF documents

Poppler is a free software utility library for rendering Portable Document Format (PDF) documents. Its development is supported by freedesktop.org. It is commonly used on Linux systems, and is used by the PDF viewers of the open source GNOME and KDE desktop environments.

The clipboard is a buffer that some operating systems provide for short-term storage and transfer within and between application programs. The clipboard is usually temporary and unnamed, and its contents reside in the computer's RAM.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">QGIS</span> Open-source desktop GIS software

QGIS is a geographic information system (GIS) software that is free and open-source. QGIS supports Windows, macOS, and Linux. It supports viewing, editing, printing, and analysis of geospatial data., QGIS was previously also known as Quantum GIS.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Graphics Layout Engine</span> Graphics programming language

Graphics Layout Engine (GLE) is a graphics scripting language designed for creating publication quality graphs, plots, diagrams, figures and slides. GLE supports various graph types such as function plots, histograms, bar graphs, scatter plots, contour lines, color maps and surface plots through a simple but flexible set of graphing commands. More complex output can be created by relying on GLE's scripting language, which is full featured with subroutines, variables, and logic control. GLE relies on LaTeX for text output and supports mathematical formula in graphs and figures. GLE's output formats include EPS, PS, PDF, JPEG, and PNG.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">GrafX2</span> Raster graphics editor

GrafX2 is a bitmap graphics editor inspired by the Amiga programs Deluxe Paint and Brilliance. It is free software and distributed under the GPL-2.0-only license.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">OpenSCAD</span> Free software for creating 3D objects

OpenSCAD is a free software application for creating solid 3D computer-aided design (CAD) objects. It is a script-only based modeller that uses its own description language; the 3D preview can be manipulated interactively, but cannot be interactively modified in 3D. Instead, an OpenSCAD script specifies geometric primitives and defines how they are modified and combined to render a 3D model. As such, the program performs constructive solid geometry (CSG). OpenSCAD is available for Windows, Linux, and macOS.

Xena is open-source software for use in digital preservation. Xena is short for XML Electronic Normalising for Archives.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">LibreCAD</span> Free and open-source 2D CAD software

LibreCAD is a computer-aided design (CAD) application for 2D design. It is free and open-source, and available for Linux, macOS, and Windows operating systems.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Embroidermodder</span> Free machine embroidery software

Embroidermodder is a free machine embroidery software tool that supports a variety of formats and allows the user to add custom modifications to their embroidery designs.

Zstandard is a lossless data compression algorithm developed by Yann Collet at Facebook. Zstd is the corresponding reference implementation in C, released as open-source software on 31 August 2016.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Flowblade</span> Free and open-source video editing software

Flowblade Movie Editor is a free and open-source video editing software for Linux.

LÖVE is a free, open-source, cross-platform framework released under the zlib license for developing video games. The framework is written in C++ and uses Lua as its scripting language and is still maintained by its original developers. The framework is cross-platform supporting the platforms Microsoft Windows, macOS, Linux, Android, and iOS.