GdPicture FORUMS

[Steve]

In GDPicturePro5 how do you display Wang annotations ?

Steve

[Loïc]

Hi Steve,

Wang annotation is a tiff tag as used in 'Imaging for Windows'.
http://www.awaresystems.be/imaging/tiff ... ation.html


With GdPicture you can read and write the Wang annotation data:

wang-kodak-annotation-t275.html

To display they you need to need to analys the content of the byte array according to the "Wang specifications". Unfortunately I don"t know where you can find this documentation. I never played with this tag.

Best regards,

Loïc Carrère

[Steve]

Hi Loic,

You list support of Wang Annotations on your website. But you can't really claim that being able to read a tag is supporting Wang Annotations.

Reading the data in tag 32932 is easy. To support Wang annotations you then need decode this data, display the annotations on top of a TIF image, according to the annotation specification. There are a number of different annotation types (Post-it notes, rubber stamps, typed text, freehand lines, etc) and all need to be displayed in the correct position and color.

You also need a method of creating or modifying such annotations.

I can send you a copy of the TIF annotation specification and my notes and sample TIF files if you think these would be useful.

I'm impressed with GDPicturePro, but we would have to use one of the other Imaging SDKs that do actually support Wang annotations.

I should also add that the Windows XP Picture and Fax Viewer uses these same annotations.

Steve

[Loïc]

Hi Steve,

I already have the public annotation specs which are fully illegible. Now it is called Global 360 specifications and can be found here: http://support.global360.com/content/I4 ... nospec.htm
It is new specification which use the same tag ID to store the informations ...

Like I said GdPicture can read and write these data through the tiff tag but it is the only thing it can do.
Encoding/Decoding wang or global 360 annotations can't be done by our component. It is an impossible work and I don't know anyone who has managed to do this at 100 %. These annotations are a closed sources package.

To be honest I don't understand developers who choose to use these annotations today. I think it it a great risk. To me, the PDF is the best choice to mix raster & vectorial data within a file.

Best regards,

Loïc Carrère