xv is a

shareware Shareware is a type of proprietary software that is initially shared by the owner for trial use at little or no cost. Often the software has limited functionality or incomplete documentation until the user sends payment to the software developer. ...

program written by John Bradley to display and modify digital images under the

X Window System The X Window System (X11, or simply X) is a windowing system for bitmap displays, common on Unix-like operating systems. X originated as part of Project Athena at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 1984. The X protocol has been at ...

. While popular in the early 1990s ("XV is widely considered to be the preeminent image viewer for the X Window System"), no official releases have been made since December 1994. Bradley was unable to negotiate the LZW patent licence necessary for encoding the then-popular

GIF The Graphics Interchange Format (GIF; or , ) is a Raster graphics, bitmap Image file formats, image format that was developed by a team at the online services provider CompuServe led by American computer scientist Steve Wilhite and released ...

format. The patent has now expired, so this legal constraint is no longer relevant. Until at least 2000, Bradley collected third-party updates to xv, for example, support for the PNG image format. These were published as source code patches only. xv can be run from the command line and offers a graphical interface. xv can be used also for

image manipulation Image editing encompasses the processes of altering images, whether they are Digital photography, digital photographs, traditional Photographic processing, photo-chemical photographs, or illustrations. Traditional analog image editing is known ...

(cropping or stretching of images and other effects), supports various image file formats (including among others Sun Raster, or Targa) and allows export to

PostScript PostScript (PS) is a page description language and dynamically typed, stack-based programming language. It is most commonly used in the electronic publishing and desktop publishing realm, but as a Turing complete programming language, it c ...

. It distinguishes itself from many other bitmap viewing and editing programs with a very efficient interface in which the user edits just the parameters of a fixed pipeline of processing steps, rather than modifying the bitmap directly in each operation. As a result, the user can easily undo operations (such as cropping, color modifications, filtering) out of order, rather than only being able to undo the respective last operation. While this concept limits what xv can do compared to some alternatives, the functionality it provides can be applied very conveniently and efficiently.

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Building 'xv' on Ubuntu
Image viewers Shareware X Window programs {{graphics-software-stub

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