Me Documented!

Mozilla Tiff Plugin is mozilla/netscape compatible plugin for viewing tiff images. Features include

• Zoom in - keyboard shortcut '+'
• Zoom out - keyboard shortcut '-'
• Rotate anticlockwise - keyboard shortcut 'a'
• Rotate clockwise - keyboard shortcut 'c'
• Progress bar when downloading images

Currently, a general purpose mozilla plugin for any mime type is mozplugger. Mozplugger works by spawning an application of the users choice for a particular mime type. After spawning the application it reparents the application window handle so that it gets into the browser.

At my workplace, users work heavily on tiff images. So basically, a user gets a page with links to the tiff images and opens the links in multiple tabs. With mozplugger, when more than 2 or 3 links were clicked to open in different tabs simultaneously, almost all images just opened outside the browser and never got into the browser. This happened with all applications like eog,xv,display,gqview,qiv etc etc. The system too became unusually slow.

Prior to this, an excellent plugin which was both fast and elegant was mozilla-bonobo. Mozilla-bonobo is a netscape-compatible browser plugin which allows your browser to use bonobo controls to display supported mime types. We used to use this to view tiff images as the application eog provided a bonobo control. But starting from version 2.7.0 eog removed support for bonobo and all the trouble started. I asked the moz-bonobo-list for help and its developer Christian Glodt said that bonobo is being depreciated by gnome. So, lesser and lesser applications would have support for bonobo. And thus, I took up the task of writing a mozilla plugin.

Frankly speaking, almost all the code base is taken from Christian Glodt. I just stripped off all gnome, gconf and bonobo related code from mozilla-bonobo and added tiff handling and manipulating capability like scaling, rotation etc. I must say that GTK+ is huuuuuuuuuuuuuge and has way lot of functions to make image manipulation simple.

Anyways, enough of blah blah. I have created a i386 and amd64 deb package, so all i386, amd64 debian based systems can install easily with

dpkg -i mozilla-tiff-plugin-i386.deb

For compiling the source, pkg-config, libgtk2.0-dev and mozilla-dev packages are needed.

apt-get install pkg-config, libgtk2.0-dev mozilla-dev
tar -zxvf mozilla-tiff-plugin.tar.gz
cd mozilla-tiff-plugin
make 
make plugin
make install

Thats it!