Add support for ZIF files?

[asherber]

Some sites use Zoomify images where the tiles are packaged in a single ZIF file instead of existing separately. Any change of adding support for those?

Update

ZIF file support hasn't been added to dezoomify yet, but two tools have been coded, that allow to extract an image from a ZIF file:

• an online tool (github depo)
• a C# library

[lovasoa]

Do you have an example of a website that uses that format?

[lovasoa]

We already support PFF, so adding support for a new similar format is not excluded.

[asherber]

http://goo.gl/dngQC6

[lovasoa]

OK, I reverse-engineered the format, and made a documentation for it.

[lovasoa]

I have started to work on a zif file format parser : https://gist.github.com/lovasoa/47f61fecfa74f85a7ac2

(This is still preliminary work, and I'm not sure I'm going to have time to go further)

[asherber]

Awesome, thank you!

[lovasoa]

It took me much more time than expected, but my parser now works.
You can try it here : http://lovasoa.github.io/ZIF/

[asherber]

That's fantastic – thanks very much for your work on this!

[asherber]

BTW, I was able to use your documentation and code to write a parser in C#, which lets me iterate through ZIF files and save the assembled images to disk automatically. Thanks again for the time you put in on this.

[lovasoa]

Awesome! I'm happy someone read the documentation I wrote!

Can you publish your parser too? Maybe other people will prefer a C# application over a webpage and a canvas...

[asherber]

Yes, I'll put something up on GitHub when I have a few minutes to clean
it up. There's also someone who has done a C# project based on some of
your earlier work: https://github.com/RedRogueXIII/DeZoomify_NET Looks
like that hasn't been touched in a couple of years, but I'll let him
know about my parser in case he's interested in using it.

[lovasoa]

Thank you for telling me about dezoomify.net, I didn't know about it. I'm always happy to see other people's interest in my code.

I hope to read your's soon :)

[asherber]

https://github.com/asherber/Zif.Reader

[asherber]

I notice in some places, like http://sourceforge.net/p/dezoomify/wiki/CommandSyntax/ , that zoom level 0 is designated as the most zoomed out; my C# code followed you in making 0 the most zoomed in. Since you have more experience with Zoomify in general, do you have an opinion about this, or was it something of a random choice?

[lovasoa]

Yes zoomify counts the tiers from the most zoomed out to the most zoomed in. In their own zoomify viewer, the first thing they do after having parsed the zoomlevel metadata in a zif file is to reverse the tile offsets and tile sizes arrays, in order to be coherent with their other functions.

Since I made my parser an independent p piece of code, and since the most interesting zoom level is the most zoomed one, I decided not to reverse my zoom level array, and to keep it in the same order as in the zif file (larger zoomlevel first). You can reverse the array in your code if you want !

[asherber]

Excellent, thanks!

[lovasoa]

I'm reopening this because even if most of the work is done, I didn't add support for ZIF to zoomify yet.

[ar-jan]

This would be a great addition.

[lovasoa]

It's currently not in my priority list... The other tools mentioned above work well, and are faster then it would be if it were integrated into dezoomify...

But I'm opened to any pull request. All the reverse-engineering work has been done already.