[fluxus] ppm format commit (was feature request: pipeable ppm image output)

[Claude Heiland-Allen]

Dave Griffiths wrote:
>>> I've done basically the following with Pd+Gridflow, it works quite well,
>>> so I think it would be good if it were possible with Fluxus too :-)
>>>
>>> In Fluxus:
>>>
>>> (start-framedump "myfifo.ppm" "ppm")
>>>
>> is ppm the only file format you can do this with though? tif's would
>> probably be faster as they will be a lot smaller, and the data won't have
>> to be converted to ascii.
> 
> sorry, I thought ppms were ascii - seems they are a wierd combination of
> ascii and binary, which is as good for this as uncompressed tiffs...
>
> ppm support is in cvs now. do you need anything else to write to a fifo,
> or does it just look like a file to fluxus?

I think the only limitation is that you can't seek, but I don't think
that's necessary for writing ppm.  I think the program will be signalled
with SIGPIPE or something similar if the reader quits before the writer
has finished writing, but I'm not 100% sure.

>
> cheers,
> 
> dave
>