On Tue, 2002-04-23 at 23:57, Russell St.Fleur wrote: I created a plug-in for gimp and when given certain parameters add text to the file. I would like to know if there is a way for the plug-in to work ie.. add the text to the file via the command line.
This plug-in is stored on a Server and being accessed by other client machines. I want them to be able to open a window access the server, run the program without getting the dreaded "Gtk-WARNING **: cannot open display" error. Just straight command line editing of an image and outputing it to a format.

This is because Gimp needs an X display to work. Now, there is a way to work around this, either just point it to some machine that gives it access to the DISPLAY, or use the virtual framebuffer of the linux kernel (if the machine runs linux) and run an framebuffer X server on it.

But you probably dont want to do that, since ImageMagick suits your task much better; see http://www.imagemagick.org/ - it is a poweful commandline tool that can also add text to images. And it has C, C++, Perl and Java API that you can use to write a small program or have it as part of a larger one. And it does not depend on a $DISPLAY, it can use truetype fonts directly from files.

I use that myself with my webcam script to add the date and time and caption for example.

I hope this helps

Tuomas

On Wed, Apr 24, 2002 at 12:55:15PM +0300, Tuomas Kuosmanen wrote:

This plug-in is stored on a Server and being accessed by other client machines. I want them to be able to open a window access the server, run the program without getting the dreaded "Gtk-WARNING **: cannot open display" error. Just straight command line editing of an image and outputing it to a format.

This is because Gimp needs an X display to work. Now, there is a way to work around this, either just point it to some machine that gives it access to the DISPLAY, or use the virtual framebuffer of the linux kernel (if the machine runs linux) and run an framebuffer X server on it.

Hm. I suppose, Xvfb is the better choice here as there is no need to actually see anything. It also does not need any graphics hardware.

Citing the man page: The X community has found many other novel uses for Xvfb, including testing clients against unusual depths and screen configurations, doing batch processing with Xvfb as a background rendering engine, load testing, as an aid to porting the X server to a new platform, and providing an unobtrusive way to run applications that don't really need an X server but insist on having one anyway.

Bye, Tino.

Hi,

tino.schwarze@informatik.tu-chemnitz.de (Tino Schwarze) writes:

This is because Gimp needs an X display to work. Now, there is a way to work around this, either just point it to some machine that gives it access to the DISPLAY, or use the virtual framebuffer of the linux kernel (if the machine runs linux) and run an framebuffer X server on it.

Hm. I suppose, Xvfb is the better choice here as there is no need to actually see anything. It also does not need any graphics hardware.

or (if you are brave) try to use gimp-1.3 which doesn't need an X display at all if started with the --no-interface command-line option.

Salut, Sven