[fpc-pascal]How to use Linux libraries?

[Micha? Kamburelis]

Hi Rainer

Pasjpeg is basically just a Pascal translation of sources originally 
written in ANSI C by IJG, Independent JPEG Group. You can find this C 
code with documentation at http://www.ijg.org/. At these URL there are 
also some informations about JPEG file coding (actually JFIF, JPEG is a 
standard for compressing image data and JFIF is a file format that uses 
JPEG compression; JFIF stands for "JPEG File Interchange Format"). But 
you will not find there a complete specification of JPEG format and, to 
be honest, I don't know where you can find it on the internet. 
Definitely, coding JPEG [de]compression by yourself is really an 
advanced topic and I would not advice you this.

Besides, Pasjpeg can really do all that you want. Pasjpeg contains some 
extra units not found in IJG code - mainly Jeg.pas and Pasjpeg.pas.

The first one implements a class that loads a jpeg image into a TGraphic 
class descendant from Graphics unit. Graphics unit comes from Delphi's 
VCL and it's not available with FPC - but I know Lazarus tries to 
implement library compatible with VCL (but Lazarus does it for FPC and 
for many platforms FPC supports), so maybe you could integrate Jpeg with 
Lazarus (I don't know, maybe they even already did that in Lazarus ?). 
So that's the first option you can try.

The second option is to take Jpeg unit and tweak it so that it is 
capable of reading and storing jpeg images in your preferable format, 
like simple two-dimensional array of RGB. For that you will definitely 
need IJG documentation to understand how Jpeg unit works - it's really 
too big subject to describe it in this letter.

Third option is probably the easiest one - you can use Pasjpeg unit to 
convert jpeg files into BMP files. Than you can learn how to read BMP 
files, it's really simple, and after doing that you will be able to read 
both BMP and JPEG images in quite the same way, you will only have to 
"filter" JPEG images through Pasjpeg. Not very elegant way to read JPEG 
images, but simple and working.

There is also a forth option, probably the hardets one : read IJG 
documentation and write your own code to handle pasjpeg library without 
Pasjpeg and Jpeg units (I hope you don't get confused when I sometimes 
use "pasjpeg" to name the whole "pasjpeg library" and sometimes to name 
the specific unit named "Pasjpeg.pas" in that library). Actually, if you 
learn how to do that you will not need pasjpeg library - under Linux 
there is usually a libjpeg.so shared library that contains whole IJG 
code, so you will not have to use pasjpeg library - just link 
dynamically to libjpeg.so (or statically to libjpeg.a).

Final words : what do I advise : take the easiest way - learn how to 
read BMP images and than use Pasjpeg unit. Also, there is a question - 
do you really need the JPEG format ? If you want just ANY image format 
than thinking about JPEG is a big mistake - there are many image formats 
MUCH easier to read. E.g. PPM (the simplest possible image format, you 
can handle it with a few lines of code), PNG (nice format with lots of 
capabilities and lossless compression (you DO know that JPEG compression 
is lossy, do you?), very easily readable with libpng) and so on. BMP 
format is somewhere between, it's a bit more complicated and a bit more 
functional than PPM - if you don't care about JPEGs anymore I would 
advice you PPM (or more general PNM) or PNG formats.

And remember there are many programs that can convert JPEG images into 
other formats (like PPM and PNG).

Oh, one more thing - Pasjpeg unit uses TStream classes and you said you 
dont like Classes. But, really, they are so simple - I guarantee that 
you will be glad when you learn how to use them and when you see what 
TStream and it's descendants can do for you.

Hope this helps,
-- 
Michalis Kamburelis
michalis at camelot.homedns.org
http://www.camelot.homedns.org/~michalis/