Re: MIME handling for common MS Windows attachments?

[Russ Allbery <rra@stanford.edu>]

Hrvoje Niksic <hniksic@srce.hr> writes:

> The trouble is that xv is much better than most of the other stuff out
> there, especially for 8bit displays.  Defaulting to free stuff might be
> a politically good idea, but it's a lousy choice for users.

This hasn't been my experience; ImageMagick is enough better than xv that
I never use xv any more.

>> What image viewing programs exist out there?

> There is imlib/gtk-based gqview, then there's ee (Electric Eyes) (also
> imlib-based), ImageMagick's display (it produces high quality display,
> but it's very slow, making it unsuitable for MIME viewers).

This surprises me.  I've found ImageMagick relatively competative with xv
for most images.  It's a good bit slower when it has to dither 24-bit, but
that's not the common case for a MIME viewer, surely.  And the quality
difference is noticeable.

I'll point out as an aside that xv doesn't appear to deal at all well with
virtual desktops, tending (at least for me) to put the popup window in the
upper left corner pane.  ImageMagick correctly displays the image in the
current pane.

-- 
Russ Allbery (rra@stanford.edu)         <URL:http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>