2005.09.05 17:45 "Re: [Tiff] LibTIFFDelphi and Delphi OpenPictureDialog", by Joris Van Damme

Stephen,

Does anyone have an example of how to hook LibTIFFDelphi into the Delphi OpenPictureDialog component so that it will show TIFF images in the preview panel?

Please post only plain text messages to the list.

What you're asking for is quite something...

The standard OpenPictureDialog works with a TImage component. A TImage works with a TPicture. A TPicture access the list of known TGraphic classes to get a list of supported extensions, and build a particular TGraphic that supports a particular file format.

Thus, for this to work, you'll have to build a TGraphicTiff sorts of thing, that inherits from the TGraphic. This involves implementing all virtual methods of TGraphic, and registring your descendant. Next, when a TPicture is asked what file extensions it supports, it will include the extensions added by the TGraphicTiff registration (or something, this is all from the top of my head...), and when a TPicture is asked to open a 'xxx.tif' file, it will know that it can create a TGraphicTiff and delegate the actual opening and rendering to this TGraphicTiff.

The bad news is that this is a lot of work. The worst news, however, is that the whole system is useless. Many TIFF files are quite large. In the standard VCL system explained above, normally, message pump is frozen while the complete image gets decoded and resized and rendered, all in the main thread. This means that, if the user accesses a directory with such large TIFFs, and riscs clicking one, he'll next have to wait for seconds or more, before application starts responding again. A user may very well prefer not previewing over halting his action for seconds or more every time he clicks another file.

When the user next clicks 'open' on the dialog, its content isn't actually destroyed (untill the OpenPictureDialog component on your calling form is destroyed, or is used a next time). Your calling code gets a filename only. Thus, the most likely action is that your calling code opens again the same TIFF file, repeating all previous processing, producing duplicate memory. This, too, adds to the whole system becoming completely useless on anything but small sized images.

It is not impossible to work around this. In fact, I'm in the process of building a much nicer, multi-thread TGraphic system on top of the existing one. It's a lot of work though, and I don't expect it to become avaibable any time sooner then 2006.

If you're nevertheless interested in using TGraphic the normal VCL way, take a look at graphics.pas and jpeg.pas for clues on how to build your TGraphicTiff. If you're unclear on the basics of TImage, TPicture, and TGraphic, and how they interact, http://www.awaresystems.be/techtalks/003_graphic_picture_image.html may be helpful.

Kind regards,

Joris Van Damme
info@awaresystems.be
http://www.awaresystems.be/
Download your free TIFF tag viewer for windows here:
http://www.awaresystems.be/imaging/tiff/astifftagviewer.html