Read Me

following is the an excerpt of the old README that was written M.J.Gourlay;
it is now obsolete, and is kept mostly for historical reasons

			A Mennucci

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DISTRIBUTION

I  have occasionally found xmorph being distributed without
my consent on CDROM's, (and on some CDROM's with my consent).  I
generally have no problem letting people distribute xmorph on CD,
except that I want to have a copy of the CD for myself.  Also, if I
know about the CD, I can tell people to buy it, so it is to our mutual
advantage to let me know about CD's with xmorph.

Digital Equipment Corporation gives out their Multimedia Showcase CDROM
for free to interested Digital UNIX Alpha users.  If you own a DEC
Alpha, I suppose that you can ask DEC for this CDROM.

SGI distributes Xmorph on their Freeware CDROM and web site.
If you have an SGI, look at
  http://freeware.sgi.com/

A major computer manufacturer distributes a very old (1996) version of
Xmorph with their machines which is broken, buggy, and lacks several
important features (such as the ability to use 24-bit displays).  If
you have been using the version that comes with some machines, then you
might be wasting your time with crippled code, and my credibility of a
programmer has been diminished.  This is the sort of problem I want to
avoid by having people who want to print CDROM's first consult with me
to make sure they have the latest version or that they notify their
users or customers about how to obtain new versions from me.

Beware that versions released on CD are more than likely not the latest
version, since CD's last forever but latest versions last for a few
months.

The place where I make official new releases of xmorph is at my web
site and sometimes at the Open Group X11 FTP site with the rest of the
X Window System contributed software.  Look for xmorph in ftp.x.org
(was export.lcs.mit.edu) in the contrib directory hierarchy, in the
applications or graphics subdirectories:

  ftp://ftp.x.org/contrib/applications
  ftp://ftp.x.org/contrib/graphics

The Open Group site is mirrored around the world.  Please find the Open
Group mirror most appropriate for you.  There are several mirrors in
Europe, and from what I am told, if you are in Europe, network delays
calling Open Group directly are very bad, so look for a mirror local to
you.

NOTE:  Since the X Window System FTP site changes its structure each
time they make a new major release of the X Window System, the place
where the latest xmorph can be found might change.  I make a new
release about twice a year, so if the version you find is much older
than about six months, then it is probably not the latest version.

A Linux version is being maintained and that version is kept at
sunsite.unc.edu along with other Linux software for X, but their version
is ancient.

A direct source of the source code is through my home page.  I put
releases up at this location more often than anywhere else:
  http://www.colorado-research.com/~gourlay/
  http://www.colorado-research.com/~gourlay/software/
  http://www.colorado-research.com/~gourlay/software/Graphics/
  http://www.colorado-research.com/~gourlay/software/Graphics/Xmorph/


DISPLAY HARDWARE NOTES

Xmorph is designed to work on static gray 1-bit, pseudo-color 8-bit,
and true-color 24-bit displays.  If you are running on a static gray
or pseudo-color display, the images that show up in the xmorph image
panels are dithered (which makes them look grainy), but the images
stored internally are full-color non-dithered, and the image files
written by xmorph are full-color non-dithered.  Do not let the
relatively poor image quality of the dithered image panels concern
you.  They are only "schematic" images to let you manipulate the
meshes.  Remember that the xmorph graphical user interface is
primarily used to manipulate meshes, not to display images.  To view
your morphs in full glory requires that you make an animation of your
image sequence.

Notes about color dithering:

I have made the color dithering routines within xmorph somewhat
generic, in the sense that you can choose the number of bits per
channel that you want to use when creating the so-called ``dithering
colormap''.  Look in "diw_map.h".  You can change the number of bits
used to represent each of the channels red, green, and blue.  It is
generally believed that the human eye is most sensitive to green, and
least sensitive to blue, so it makes sense to give more bits to green
and fewer to blue.  However, one could imagine that somebody could
prefer to give more bits to another color, or whatever you want.

Also, for 16-bit colormapped displays (which are becoming more common
now), you could conceivably use up 8 bits or more for your colormap
without worrying about interference with other programs.  I would
recommend using a RGB-332 dithering colormap in that case.

Another thing:  Some monochrome displays simulate PseudoColor by
allowing the applications to have a colormap.  This makes application
programming more simple.  The X server then has the responsibility
of dithering from color to monochrome.  Some such monochrome systems
have a 4-bit PseudoColor simulation mode which could conceivably be
used with xmorph, if some changes were made in the "dither_image"
routine in "image_x.c".  The colormap situation is easy to deal
with: Just use 1 bit per channel to get an RGB-111 dithering colormap.

tkmorph uses Tk PhotoImages to display images and the dithering is a
built-in function that I have relatively little control over.  However,
the Tk PhotoImage dithering seems to be fast and clean so I'm more than
satisfied with it.  In any case, the displayed image is dithered but
the actual images that are written to output files are not dithered, as
in xmorph.






WORLD WIDE WEB SITES

The main Xmorph web site is at
  http://www.colorado-research.com/~gourlay/software/Graphics/Xmorph/
That site has source code, example images, meshes and morph movies.

For xmorph animations see Andy Thaller's WWW home page at
  http://www.informatik.tu-muenchen.de/cgi-bin/nph-gateway/hphalle2/~thaller

The old one was at this address:
  http://www.informatik.tu-muenchen.de/cgi-bin/nph-gateway/hphalle8/~thaller

There is a weird morph on Bruno Boettcher's home page:
  http://erm6.u-strasbg.fr/~bboett/fr.index.html




Please report to me if you have animations that are cool that you would
like other people to see.