Written in C License Custom free license | Operating system | |
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Initial release 1993; 24 years ago (1993) Stable release 2.9.10.3 / January 2, 2015; 2 years ago (2015-01-02) Repository sourceforge.net/p/sf-xpaint/code/?source=navbar | ||
XPaint (alternatively capitalized Xpaint) is a free open source image editing program for bitmap images on the X Window environment on Unix-like operating systems. Its main goal is to be a lightweight and simple to use raster graphics editor.
Contents
Features
XPaint features a substantial number of standard (and less standard) paint operations. It allows for editing and browsing multiple images simultaneously, and supports most of the common bitmap formats, including PNG, GIF, TIFF, TGA, PPM, XPM, XBM, BMP, ICO, JPEG, JPEG2000, PGF etc. It can also read and import certain vector formats such as PostScript, PDF, SVG, as well as plain text or TeX, LaTeX files (whenever a TeX system and PostScript/PDF utilities are installed).
XPaint is divided into a toolbox area, for selecting the current paint operation, and paint windows for modifying/creating images. Each paint window has access to its own color palette and set of patterns.
Recent versions have support for advanced image manipulations (image zooming and resizing, filters, color modifications, separation of RGB channels), scripting, layers, edition of alpha channel and of transparent images, vector formats import, truetype fonts and anti-aliasing, geometric transformations of such fonts, etc. …
The scripting capabilities include programmable filters, batch processing, creation of 2D and 3D images, etc. XPaint also recently acquired a built-in editor which can be used to produce posters containing text and images.
Technology
As XPaint only uses the basic image libraries (PNG, JPEG, JPEG2000, TIFF) along with the X11, Fontconfig and Freetype libraries, it has a very small memory footprint and very few dependencies. As a consequence, it can be compiled on most Unix systems.
The user interface relies upon Xaw-based interface toolkits. However, XPaint can be compiled with the libxaw3dxft library, which is a variant of Athena widgets with a more modern look and feel. Libxaw3dxft makes use of UTF8 and antialiased fonts in the menus, and was originally developed as a subproject in order to modernize XPaint. It is now a separate project.
The scripting capabilities are achieved through compilation of scripts in plain C language, which should conform to XPaint's internal APIs.
History
David Koblas originally released version 1.0 in 1989 with black and white support only, version 2.0 was released in 1993 supporting color. Torsten Martinsen extended it from 1996 to 1999 (versions 2.2.x to 2.5.7) based on Davids last version 2.1.1. Since around 2000, it is maintained and developed by Jean-Pierre Demailly.