Re: Inlining pixbufs

[Owen Taylor <otaylor redhat com>]

Tim Janik <timj@gtk.org> writes:

> On 23 Jun 2000, Havoc Pennington wrote:
> 
> > 
> > Hi,
> > 
> > We need an equivalent to 'convertrgb' in gnome-libs/tools in order to 
> > inline our stock icons, and since convertrgb is crufty and this is a
> > generally useful feature, I wrote a new program to handle it. The
> > program gets installed, so other people can use it.
> > 
> > The idea is:
> >  - we create a program image-to-inline that loads image files and 
> >    can create a file full of C variable declarations
> >  - we use this to create the inline variables for GTK
> >  - gdk-pixbuf.h now contains gdk_pixbuf_new_from_inline() that 
> >    reads the stuff image-to-inline outputs.
> > 
> > Patch appended.
> 
> 
> uhm, look at the CSource plugin in gimp. i had to face this
> problem earlier last year for beast, and CSource is what steamed
> from it.
> CSource can easily be extracted into a standalone saving routine
> if you want that, and since i mostly use it for alpha icons, it
> implements simple RLE to squeeze the obvious bloat out of the
> executable (and is about as fast a memcpy() on extraction).
> CSource saves a macro for RLE extraction on the way, but i have
> a more sophisticated function that also does bounds checking
> laying around in beast/bse/bseutils.c:bse_icon_from_pixdata()
> already.

The thing that this misses is that if you don't compress the data,
then you can use the data without a copy, and it can be shared
between apps. If you have 20 apps up displaying stock icons, that's
a lot more than a 50% saving.

Regards,
                                        Owen