DESCRIPTION
===========

PRIMA is a general purpose extensible graphical user interface toolkit with a
rich set of standard widgets and an emphasis on 2D image processing tasks. A
Perl program using PRIMA looks and behaves identically on X11 and Win32.

PREREQUISITES
=============

Graphic libraries
-----------------

Prima can use several graphic libraries to handle image files.  Compiling Prima
with at least one library, preferably for GIF files is strongly recommended,
because internal library images are stored in GIFs. Support for the following
libraries can be compiled in on all platforms:

   - libXpm
   - libpng
   - libjpeg
   - libungif
   - libtiff
   - libX11  - support for native X11 bitmap files

For Win32, CPAN contains binary distributions that can
be installed just for this purpose:

  http://search.cpan.org/~karasik/Prima-codecs-win32/
  http://search.cpan.org/~karasik/Prima-codecs-win64/

it should work for all MSVC and GCC compilers and for native,
cygwin, and mingw/strawberry perl runtimes.

Fribidi
-------

To support bi-directional text input and output you'll need C<Text::Bidi>
module from CPAN v2.10. The module is not a prerequisite; it'll need the
external fribidi library to build. On windows the library is not installed by
default, grab it here:

  http://prima.eu.org/download/fribidi-win32.zip

SOURCE DISTRIBUTION INSTALLATION
================================

Create a makefile by running Makefile.PL using perl and then run make ( or
gmake, or nmake for Win32):

    perl Makefile.PL
    make
    make test
    make install

If 'perl Makefile.PL' fails, the compilation history along with errors can be
found in makefile.log. 

If make fails with message

** No image codecs found

that means you don't have image libraries that Prima supports in your path.
See PREREQUISITES section.

If some of the required libraries or include files can not be found,
INC=-I/some/include and LIBS=-L/some/lib semantics should be used to tell
Makefile.PL about these. Check ExtUtils::MakeMaker for more.

GTK2
----

Prima can be compiled width GTK2 on unix systems. To do so run

    perl Makefile.PL WITH_GTK2=1

If successful, Prima will display GTK file dialogs. 

BINARY DISTRIBUTION INSTALLATION
================================

Available only for MSWin32. Please use installation from source for
the other platforms.

To install the toolkit from the binary distribution run 

   perl ms_install.pl

You have to patch Prima::Config.pm manually if you need to compile
prima-dependent modules.

USAGE EXAMPLES
==============

Try running the toolkit examples, by default installed in
INSTALLSITEARCH/Prima/examples directory ( find it by running perl
-V:installsitearch ). All examples and programs included into the distribution
can be run either by their name or with perl as argument - for example,
..../generic or perl ..../generic .  ( perl ..../generic.bat for win32 )


Typical code starts with

   use Prima qw(Application);

and ends with
   
   run Prima;

which is an event loop call. Start from the following code:

   use Prima qw(Application Buttons);

   new Prima::MainWindow(
      text     => 'Hello world!',
      size     => [ 200, 200],
   )-> insert( Button =>
      centered => 1,
      text     => 'Hello world!',
      onClick  => sub { $::application-> close },
   );

   run Prima;

Or, alternatively, start the VB program, which is the toolkit visual builder. 

MORE INFORMATION
================

The toolkit contains set of POD files describing its features, and the
programming interfaces.  Run 'podview Prima' or 'perldoc Prima' command to
start with the main manual page.

Visit http://www.prima.eu.org/ for the recent versions of the toolkit. You can
use cvs update feature to keep in touch. The mailing list on the toolkit is
available, you can ask questions there. See the Prima homepage for details.

COPYRIGHT
=========

(c) 1997-2003 The Protein Laboratory, University of Copenhagen

AUTHORS
=======

Dmitry Karasik <dmitry@karasik.eu.org>
Anton Berezin  <tobez@tobez.org>
Vadim Belman   <voland@lflat.org>

CREDITS
=======

David Scott
Teo Sankaro
Kai Fiebach
Johannes Blankenstein
Mike Castle
H.Merijn Brand
Richard Morgan
Kevin Ryde
Chris Marshall
Slaven Rezic
Waldemar Biernacki
Andreas Hernitscheck
David Mertens
Teo Sankaro
Gabor Szabo
Fabio D'Alfonso
Rob "Sisyphus"
Chris Marshall
Reini Urban
Nadim Khemir
Vikas N Kumar
Upasana Shukla
Sergey Romanov
Mathieu Arnold
Petr Pisar
Judy Hawkins
Myra Nelson
Sean Healy
Ali Yassen