PictView: Support WEBP and SVG Files

[melloware]

WebP is a raster graphics file format developed by Google intended as a replacement for JPEG, PNG, and GIF file formats. It supports both lossy and lossless compression,[8] as well as animation and alpha transparency.

Google announced the WebP format in September 2010, and released the first stable version of its supporting library in April 2018.

1. Add *.webp to the default PictViewer list

2. Support WEBP in the Pictview Plugin

3. Add *svg to the default PictViewer list

4. Support SVG in the Pictview Plugin

[lejcik]

This is something what was missing in PictView plugin - support for newer image file types. I added an experimental support for .heif and .webp image files. The plugin would need a bit more tuning, but it's quite useful yet. Whoever is interested, you can find it in my fork in this branch:

https://github.com/lejcik/salamander/tree/plugin-pictview-support-for-heif-and-webp

The code structure of the plugin is very complex. Firstly I tried out to modify it to add support for other image file types, but when I changed something, another issue appeared on the other end. This is kind of "please don't touch this code!" legacy and monolithic code... This is not a complaint, my codes looked similar 20 years ago 😀

Plugin uses pict-view library, and I found out that plugin can paste an image from clipboard. Then I found a way how the library can read a bitmap from memory. So, if I open an arbitrary image file and convert it to a bitmap, the pict-view library will accept it. My implementation replaces API of the library. With minimal code modification I was able to add new image loaders.

This approach has some limitations - only raster images are supported (no vector images such as svg), only primary image can be load (no animated images), no save-as in the new image filetypes (only existing ones), etc. But I think for the most cases this is ok.

Here are a few issues I have to resolve:

• load libheif.dll and libwebp.dll dynamically (currently they have to be copied to the directory where salamand.exe is),
• libheif: not sure how to cancel heif_decode_image(), image decoding may take a few seconds and cannot be interrupted yet,
• can't show image loading progress (image has to be loaded and decoded, and only then a bitmap can be shown),
• read thumbnail, if it's present in the file,
• read EXIF, if it's present in the file,
• printing on x64 causes crash of the background pict-view process,
• consider adding support for other raster image file types.

Any feedback is welcome. Enjoy 😉

[melloware]

Can you submit a PR?

[lejcik]

It's still not ready for pull request, but ok, I created one, and I will keep it as a draft: #61

[melloware]

OK i found this awesome single file C library for SVG: https://github.com/memononen/nanosvg

[KRtekTM]

https://github.com/KRtkovo-eu-AI/salamander/tree/plugins_darkmode/src/plugins/webview2renderviewer

WebView2 Render Viewer .NET Supported File Types

Category	Extensions
HTML and web archives	.html, .htm, .xhtml, .mhtml, .mht
Markdown (rendered to HTML)	.md, .markdown, .mdown, .mkd, .mdx
SVG vector graphics	.svg, .svgz
Modern image formats	.webp, .avif, .apng
Raster image formats	.png, .jpg, .jpeg, .jfif, .gif, .bmp, .ico, .tif, .tiff
Portable Document Format	.pdf

All matches are case-insensitive. Files larger than 32 MB are rejected to match the plug-in limits.

[melloware]

@KRtekTM this is amazing change. Do you have a build I can test this with?

[melloware]

@KRtekTM i think this deserves its own PR here this is a great addition

[KRtekTM]

@KRtekTM this is amazing change. Do you have a build I can test this with?

Yes, here: https://github.com/KRtkovo-eu-AI/salamander/releases/tag/5.0-samandarin-0.1

@KRtekTM i think this deserves its own PR here this is a great addition

Not the production quality yet.

[melloware]

Tested and SVG and WebP work great.

[KRtekTM]

So there is also PictView with backend switched to WIC (Windows Imaging Component): https://github.com/user-attachments/files/22840524/plugin_5.0_pictview_2.2_80c1a42.zip

With WebP codec installed, it's working out of the box.
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/wic/native-wic-codecs

[0xeb]

WebP is a raster graphics file format developed by Google intended as a replacement for JPEG, PNG, and GIF file formats. It supports both lossy and lossless compression,[8] as well as animation and alpha transparency.

Google announced the WebP format in September 2010, and released the first stable version of its supporting library in April 2018.

1. Add *.webp to the default PictViewer list
2. Support WEBP in the Pictview Plugin
3. Add *svg to the default PictViewer list
4. Support SVG in the Pictview Plugin

0xeb#27 (comment)