HIPR contains a large amount of information about image processing expressed in fairly general terms. However, image processing is very much a practical subject and the details of how you actually do a particular image processing task depend on the details of the system and software you are using. Since we cannot possibly know all the details of your particular system, HIPR provides a convenient way of allowing HIPR maintainers to add local information into HIPR. Local information can be used to describe such things as how to start up the local image processing package, or who to ask for help. It can also be inserted into a particular operator's worksheet in order to highlight peculiarities of the local implementation of that operator. These are only a few of the ways in which local information can be used.
There are two main places where local information can be added. Information that applies to HIPR in general, e.g. how to start up image processing packages, or who to contact for help, should be added to the introductory section entitled Local Information. On the other hand local information that pertains to a particular operator worksheet should be added to the Local Information section at the bottom of that worksheet.
The HTML and LaTeX files for general local information are generated from a HIPRscript file called local.hpr. This file is in fact just a wrapper for a file called local.loc which is where the actual information should go. The local.loc file is also contained in the src sub-directory.
Specific local information for each operator is also contained in files with a .loc extension. There is one such file for each operator, so that for instance, the local information for the morphological dilation worksheet is contained in a file called dilate.loc.
In general therefore, local information sections in HIPR are generated from source files contained in the src sub-directory with the extension .loc. These files are just standard HIPRscript files with a non-standard filename extension (all other HIPRscript files have the extension .hpr). The HIPRscript translation process takes this information and inserts it into appropriate HTML and LaTeX files.
Therefore, one way of adding local information is to edit the appropriate .loc files, and then regenerate the corresponding HTML and LaTeX files using hiprgen.pl, as described in Making Changes Using HIPRscript.
An alternative way is just to edit the appropriate LaTeX and HTML files directly to add the information. This has the disadvantage that two sets of files must be edited to keep hypermedia and hardcopy version up to date with one another, and also, if at some time in the future you do decide to use HIPRscript, your changes will be overwritten. See Editing LaTeX and HTML Files Directly for more details.
Both these methods have problems, so to make things easier we have provided a third way to add local information, as described in the next section.
Since using HIPRscript is not trivial, and editing long HTML and LaTeX files by hand may be difficult and tedious, we have set things up to make it easy to add information in a limited way without having to run HIPRscript or edit HTML or LaTeX files directly.
By default, each of the standard supplied .loc files contains little more than a link to a plain text file with a .txt extension. There is one such file for each operator, so that for instance the dilation worksheet mentioned above is associated with a file called dilate.txt. The .txt files are all contained in a sub-directory of the src directory, called local.
The .txt files are included directly by both LaTeX and HTML files, so they cannot contain any LaTeX, HTML or HIPRscript tags --- they can only contain plain text.
Adding local information using these files is simple. Just edit the appropriate file and add whatever information you require, in plain text. It is not necessary to regenerate any HTML or LaTeX files for these changes to become visible. The disadvantage of this method is that the advanced markup available using HIPRscript is not available. To use this you must edit the .loc files and then regenerate LaTeX and HTML files as described in Making Changes Using HIPRscript.
©2003 R. Fisher, S. Perkins,
A. Walker and E. Wolfart.
