WP Clipart Viewer For Linux

WP Clipart now includes a viewer to expediate the use of the clipart collection. While it is true that any editor will allow you to "browse" your system for images to open or insert, the interface can often be slow, or you have to dig through the system to find the clipart, and often the display of the images (in thumbnail form) is very small.

The Clipart Viewer (CAV) is quick, has a nice size display (up to 240x240 pixels) and the images are displayed, when resized, in their original proportions. In other words, you get a real good look at the images before you pick one. CAV then lets you copy the image in original size to the clipboard to paste into your program. The preview quality and speed are the biggest advantages to using CAV, but there are a couple other advantages that are not immediately obvious.

First, you paste the saved image while keeping CAV open. This allows you to change your mind to try a different clip or copy and paste another image quickly. You don't have to block your editor with another "open" or "insert" dialog to keep going. You can also paste it into a graphics editor if you want to do a little tweaking and not have to find it again.

On Linux, you often cannot get images into the clipboard to use in apps like AbiWord or the Gimp. Simply by keeping CAV open, Abi and Gimp can be pasted into.

I programmed CAV with Python/wxPython/wxGTK. Dependencies should not be a problem on any system as I have created "stand-alone" executables for both Linux and Windows, using cxFreeze and py2exe, respectively, and included these in the downloads for WP Clipart. [They are in the "Viewer" folder.]

Below are a few screenshots. The use of the little app is fairly self-explanatory . . . by clicking on the "caviewer" in the wpclipart/viewer directory (or more easily, by making a symlink or shortcut to that file) CAV will open with its search tree open to the clipart directory.