Shareware graphical image viewers and converters: a survey

Computer representation of graphical images is a very important component of multimedia technology. Hence there is a need for designers of multimedia documents to view, edit, manipulate and animate graphical images. A survey has been carried out on a variety of shareware graphical tools for viewing, editing, manipulating, converting and animating graphical images in the DOS and Windows programming environments of personal computers. This survey is solely based on the authors´ experience with these shareware graphical utilities. The primary objectives of this survey are to increase user awareness of these shareware graphical image processing and animation tools, to place a selection of these tools in perspective, to outline the potential graphical capabilities of these tools and to compare these capabilities.