Re: An alternative to gdk-pixbuf

[Debarshi Ray <rishi is lostca se>]

On Sun, Sep 09, 2018 at 02:57:30AM +0200, Magnus Bergman wrote:
> Many fields of science deal with images of multi
> gigabyte sizes. Ideally any image viewer should be able to handle these
> too with the right plugin (probably using GEGL in that case). But I
> think the problem with large images (say 12000x12000 or so) is giving
> it to the application as a pixmap. From my own tests it seams it's fine
> at least as long as the images are no bigger than the screen. So if the
> drawing (and implicitly also scaling) is handed over to the loading
> library (which in turn might hand it over to the plugin), this problem
> can be avoided.

Even if one does decode the entire full resolution image into a tiled
data structure (say, GeglBuffer), there's no need to create a Cairo
surface for the entire image at 1:1 zoom. All that's needed is a
surface to represent the visible area at the visible zoom. That's a
lot more manageable.