Use and distribution of Pixie is governed by the GNU Library General Public License (Version 2). Briefly, this means you can use Pixie free of charge. You can also redistribute it and/or change the source, provided you obey certain important restrictions. (These include making sure that everyone who gets the executables can also get the source code.) The source code is available from SrcInst.htm.
You should read the license itself carefully before downloading the software. In particular, you should note that Pixie comes with NO WARRANTY. You are solely responsible for determining whether the software is suitable for your purposes.
Everything about Pixie is 100% Java, so it should all run on Windows, Macs, Unix boxes and so on. But there's a key difference between using the viewer and the converter.
The Pixie Viewer -- the piece that displays the image files -- is an applet, that runs inside the browsers used by visitors to your web site. You reference it in the html coding within one of your web pages. When a visitor looks at that page, using a browser that is Java-enabled, the applet automatically runs inside the visitor's browser and displays the image.
The Converter -- the piece that creates Pixie files from image files in other formats -- is an application, not an applet. It runs on just one computer, yours, and it doesn't use a browser. To run the Converter (which you'll need to do), you'll need either a recent version of the Java Runtime Environment from JavaSoft, or MSIE from Microsoft, or a Java Development Kit. If you don't have any of these, please download the JavaSoft JRE from http://java.sun.com/products/jdk/1.1/jre/. and get it working on their examples before attempting to install Pixie.
You can download the latest version of Pixie from:
The current version is 1.13 (30th March 1998) .
The converter program is supplied as an archive of Java .class files. (See http://www.bhresearch.co.uk/Java/Pixie/SrcInst.htm to get the source code.)
The Pixie.zip archive contains the following files:
Create a new directory, for example C:\Pixie, and then extract the files from Pixie.zip into that directory.
Add an <APPLET>
HTML tag to your web page. This will look
like:
<APPLET CODE="Pixie.class" WIDTH=600 HEIGHT=300>
<PARAM NAME=Src VALUE="Eg.pxi">
</APPLET>
Alternatively, use the file Eg.htm from the install file. Copy this web page, Pixie.class and Eg.pxi to a directory on your web site's server (typically using FTP). View the new web page in your browser and make sure the Java viewer loads and works.
For the Java SDK, the Java Runtime Environment and most other setups, change to the directory with the Pixie files and type:
jre -cp ConvPxi.zip gnu.bhresearch.pixie.Convert
For MSIE on Windows95, change to the directory with the Pixie files and type:
jview -cp ConvPxi.zip gnu.bhresearch.pixie.Convert
The Java interpreter is case sensitive, so it is important that the capital letters are exactly as shown.
The program should prompt you for the filename to convert. Type Eg.wmf and press Return, and then press Return again to accept the defaults. This will convert Eg.wmf into Eg.pxi.
For more information on how to use Pixie, see Using the Pixie converter. It starts by telling you how to avoid typing in that long commandline every time.