# The &kview; Handbook

Hauke
Hildebrandt

    &Hauke.Hildebrandt.mail;

Sirtaj
Singh
Kang
Developer
Lauri
Watts

    &Lauri.Watts.mail;

Reviewer
2001
&Hauke.Hildebrandt;
&FDLNotice;
2006-05-20
3.5.2

&kview; is an image viewing program. It is small and fast and has some simple image processing commands. You can work with many different graphic file formats and convert your images to them. &kview; is not a fully-fledged image processor but it is sufficient for many of your everyday tasks.

KDE
kview
kdegraphics
image
graphic
viewer

## Introduction

&kview; is an image viewer for the &kde; desktop. You can view graphics of many different formats such as &PostScript;, TIFF &etc; By saving your files in a different format than the original you can easily convert images to other graphics formats. In addition, &kview; provides some nice little features for doing simple image processing, like stretching/shrinking, rotation and applying effects. You can arrange your images in a little slideshow.

## Menu Reference

When you start &kview; you see the typical application layout: a workspace containing your documents (images in this case), a menubar that provides access to the various commands, a toolbar with shortcut buttons for some of them and a status bar at the bottom to display status messages. When you have the loaded an image into &kview;, there is also an additional context menu available which is displayed by clicking your right mouse button over the image. Below, all menu entries are explained in the order that they appear in the menubar.

### The File Menu

&Ctrl;O File Open...

  Opens a new image in &kview;. The size of the &kview; main window and the image after loading are determined by your settings. If you open several images, only the last one is shown, but all of them can be accessed using the image list.

File Open Recent

  Displays a list of recently opened images. Selecting one from this list reopens the image.

&Ctrl;S File Save

  Save the current image.

File Save As

  Saves the image under a different name. By choosing a new file format you can convert the image to a different graphics type.

&Ctrl; P File Print...

  Prints the image. In the standard &kde; print dialog click the Options >> button, go to the tab Image Settings. Select Fit image to page size or Center image on page.

&Ctrl;W File Close

  Closes the currently displayed image.

&Ctrl;Q File Quit

  Quits &kview;. If you have several &kview; images open, all of them are closed.

### The Edit Menu

&Ctrl; C Edit Copy

  Copies the entire image or the selection to the clipboard.

&Ctrl; V Edit Paste

  Paste the contents of the clipboard as a new image (only available, if the clipboard contains a valid image).

C Edit Crop

  If you have selected any part of the image (by drawing a box around it using your mouse) you can cut off all the rest around it by using this option. Your image is effectively reduced to your selection.

F5 Edit Reload

  Reloads the image to its original state (right after opening it).

&Shift;Delete Edit Delete

  Deletes the image.

V Edit Flip Vertical

  Flips the image along the vertical. Mathematically, this does a reflection along the image's horizontal center line.

H Edit Flip Horizontal

  Flips the image along the horizontal. Mathematically, this does a reflection along the image's vertical center line.

Edit Rotate Counter-Clockwise

  Rotates the image by 90° in the counter-clockwise direction.

Edit Rotate Clockwise

  Rotates the image by 90° in the clockwise direction.

### The Effects Menu

&kview; provides some functions for simple image processing:

This menu item is only displayed in the menubar, if you choose the application plugin effects in &kview;s configure dialog

Effects Gamma Correction...

  Adjusts the gamma factor.

Effects Blend Color...

  Blends the image to selected color and opacity

Effects Change Intensity (Brightness)...

  Changes the brightness of the image. Enter the new brightness in percent (with respect to the initial value).

### The View Menu

&Ctrl;+ View Zoom In

  Enlarges the image by ten percent. Notice that this refers to the current size of the picture.

View Zoom...

  Opens a list to choose the zoom factor. This value is given in percent and always refers to the initial size of the picture.

&Ctrl;- View Zoom Out

  Reduces the image size by ten percent. Again this refers to the current size of the image.

View Fit Image to Window

  Maximizes the image size. The image is scaled to the window size, keeping the aspect ratio.

### The Go Menu

This item is only displayed in the menubar, if you choose the application plugin presenter in &kview;s configure dialog

Go Image List...

  Displays a list of the currently loaded images. You can flip through the images by either double-clicking on them or using the Previous and Next buttons. Shuffle rearranges the images in a random order. Pressing Start Slideshow will start the slideshow with the current settings for the interval. In addition, you can save and load your image list using the corresponding buttons. Slideshow interval: Here you can change the interval between the different slides for the slideshow.

S Go Start/Stop Slideshow

  Starts or stops the slideshow.

&Alt;Left Arrow Go Previous Image in List

  Switches to the previous image in the list.

&Alt;Right Arrow Go Next Image in List

  Switches to the next item in the list.

### The Tools Menu

Tools Scan Image...

  Opens images from your scanner into &kview;. This menu item is only displayed in the menubar, if you choose the application plugin scanner in &kview;s configure dialog

&Shift;Left Arrow Tools Back

  Switches to the previous image in the current folder.

&Shift;Right Arrow Tools Forward

  Switches to the next image in the current folder.

### The Settings Menu

This menu provides options for configuring &kview;, changing its appearance, shortcuts and standard behavior.

&Ctrl;M Settings Show/Hide Menubar

  Toggles the menubar on/off.

Settings Toolbars Main Toolbar (KView)
Settings Toolbars Extra Toolbar (KView)

  Toggles the main toolbar and the extra toolbar on and off respectively

Settings Show/Hide Statusbar

  Toggles the status bar on/off.

Settings Show/Hide Scrollbars

  Toggles the Scrollbars on/off.

&Ctrl; &Shift;F Settings Fullscreen Mode

  This option maximizes the &kview; window and the currently shown image so you can have a closer look at it. Even the window decorations (titlebar &etc;) are temporarily removed. Selecting this option once again switches back to normal mode.

Settings Configure Shortcuts...

  Opens a dialog for changing the key bindings. Using this option you can change the standard key shortcut for &kview;'s commands or create new ones.

Settings Configure Toolbars...

  Opens a dialog for configuring the toolbar. You can add and remove toolbuttons for &kview;'s commands with this option.

Settings Configure &kview;...

  Opens a dialog for changing some options as described in the section

### The Help Menu

&help.menu.documentation;

## Command Line Options

&kview; can be started directly from a terminal like &konsole; or xterm. Several command line options are available.

`kview` `--help`

  Lists the command line options (see below).

`kview` `--help-qt`

  Shows the options specific to &Qt; (the &GUI; library that &kde; is based on).

`kview` `--help-kde`

  Shows the &kde;-specific options.

`kview` `--help-all`

  Displays all command line options.

`kview` `--author`

  You want to send your warm wishes and euphoric cheers to someone? Here they are!

`kview` `-v`, `--version`

  Displays the version number of &kview; (and that of &Qt;/&kde;).

`kview` `--license`

  Shows under which licenses &kview; is being published.

## &kview; Options

### Viewer

This is the configuration for the part of &kview; that can be reused by other applications (meaning that the settings will also affect the &kview; part that gets embedded into &konqueror; or other applications).

&kview; viewer configuration dialog
&kview; viewer configuration dialog

#### General configuration options for KViewCanvas

Use smooth scaling (high quality but slower)

  As the option suggests, use a very high quality but relatively slow method of scaling images.

Keep aspect ratio

  If this is checked &kview; will always try to keep the aspect ratio. That means if the width is scaled with a factor x, the height is scaled with the same factor.

Center image

  If checked, the opened image will be displayed centered to the &kview; window.

Background Color

  Opens a normal &kde; color picker dialog, where you can choose the background color for the image

Minimum width:

  The width of the image shown will not get smaller than the size you enter here. A value of 10 would cause a 1x1 image to be stretched horizontally by a factor of 10.

Maximum width:

  The width of the image shown will not get bigger than the size you enter here. A value of 100 would cause a 1000x1000 image to be compressed horizontally by a factor of 0.1.

Minimum height:

  The height of the image shown will not get smaller than the size you enter here. A value of 10 would cause a 1x1 image to be stretched vertically by a factor of 10.

Maximum height:

  The height of the image shown will not get bigger than the size you enter here. A value of 100 would cause a 1000x1000 image to be compressed vertically by a factor of 0.1.

Choose which blend effects should be used:

  Every effect selected may be used to create a transition effect between the images. If you select multiple effects they will be chosen randomly.

#### Chooose and Configure Your Plugins

Browser

  Here you can enable/disable use of the browser &kview; plugin, which enables you to browse through all the images in the current folder.

### Application

Here you can set options that are special for the &kview; application when running stand-alone. What you change in here will not affect other applications.

&kview; application configuration dialog
&kview; application configuration dialog

#### Application

Resizing

  This option determines if the window and/or the image will be resized after loading a new picture into &kview;. With Only resize window enabled, the &kview; window will be resized so that it snuggly fits around the loaded image. Notice that this can reduce the main window almost to a vertical arrangement of menu entries if you load a small button pixmap (you can resize the window afterwards in the usual way, of course). If your image is pretty large (in terms of pixels), sometimes the &kview; window is resized in such a way that the caption bar completely moves off your screen. Similarly, Resize image to fit window resizes the image to fit into the &kview; workspace (keeping its aspect ratio intact). And with Don't resize anything as your choice, both &kview; and your image keep their size. With Best fit &kview; will resize the window to fit the image. The image will never be scaled up but if it is too large for the screen the image will be scaled down.

#### Plugins

Effects

  Provides some image effects (and adds an Effects to the menubar to give you access to them).

Presenter

  Creates an image list and enables you to create a slideshow.

Scanner

  Adds Scan Image... to the Tools menu to open images from your scanner into &kview;.

## Credits and License

&kview;

Program copyright 1997-2001 Sirtaj S. Kang &Sirtaj.Singh.Kang.mail;

KParts integration by &Simon.Hausmann; shaus@neuro2.med.uni-magdeburg.de

Maintainer: Matthias Kretz kretz@kde.org

Documentation copyright 2001 &Hauke.Hildebrandt; &Hauke.Hildebrandt.mail;

Documentation substantially updated by Burkhard Lück lueck@hube-lueck.de in 2005 for &kde; 3.5

&underFDL; &underGPL;

## Installation

### How to obtain &kview;

&install.intro.documentation;

&install.compile.documentation;

### Requirements

Since &kview; is part of the &kde; desktop you need a working &kde; installation to use it. However, some additional libraries are needed by &kview; to use the various graphics file formats. For example, to handle the PNG format &kview; needs the corresponding library libpng. &kview; uses the libraries that are registered by kdelibs/kimgio.

&documentation.index;