This documentation is a revised edition of the
MICE documentation of
National Support Centre London
Revision by Jens Elkner (elkner@irb.cs.uni-magdeburg.de).
User Guide to wbimport
wbimport is a tool that works together with
wb, the shared whiteboard tool.
Both were developed by Van Jacobson and Steven McCanne at Lawrence
Berkeley Laboratory, University of California, Berkeley, CA. Wbimport
was developed to manage a set of PostScript slides, scanned images or
X window dumps imported into a wb session. It is a standard tool for
MICE conferencing.
What does it do for you?
It is particularly useful if you use wb for giving seminars or lectures
over a network.
In such a situation, it can function as an OHP.
Thus is important to realise that this is a tool for the person
giving the seminar, not the people receiving it.
It allows you to control the display of images on the whiteboard by
selecting from a pre-loaded list which gives faster and simpler loading
than using the Import PS function of wb.
All pages of the whiteboard are listed in the window, and this allows
random access to any page loaded in wb.
How do you use wbimport?
Hints on use
The following suggestions are offered from experience of using the tool.
If you have other hints, please make them available by sending to
mice-nsc-uk@cs.ucl.ac.uk
- When using wbimport for slides, you will find it much easier if
each of your postscript foils is in a separate file.
If you have one file containing multiple postscript pages, use
a tool such as breakps to separate the pages.
- It is simpler to use a container file to provide a list of
files to wbimport.
- Since wb's output is rate limited, a seminar will be slowed down
if you try to ship large postscript files.
- Try to keep your foils simple.
- If the foils are in separate files, convert them to
LZ-compressed postscript (using the lzps filter included in the wbimport
distribution).
This will reduce the amount of data that has to be sent over the net by
factors of 3 to 10, depending on the page content.
We would like to hear from you regarding your experiences in using
this documentation. Comments of any kind and all technical enquiries
should be addressed to:
mice-nsc-uk@cs.ucl.ac.uk
Acknowledgement
The development of wb, vat, and sd was supported by
the Director, Office of Energy Research, Scientific Computing Staff,
of the U.S. Department of Energy under Contract No. DE-AC03-76SF00098.