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Racket-embed-images-in-source-text

by spdegabrielle on 12/27/24, 12:00 PM with 9 comments

• by neilv on 12/29/24, 8:06 PM

  He's doing this only because Racket has the unusual feature of supporting images as "self-eval" values in the source code.

  In other languages, all you'd want is the byte string (maybe BASE64-encoded, maybe with byte escape sequences), and you wouldn't need a fancy reader extension: just put a byte string literal.

  A variation on the byte string literal you might see is when people create a minilanguage out of strings. For example, if you want to represent a 2x pixel map image with a fairly small color map... you might just have a string literal of ASCII characters for each row, where each ASCII character maps to an RGB color (or transparent) that you specify, with a simple function to translate it to binary. Then it looks like ASCII art in your source code.

  Vector images, OTOH, are more likely to have a textual language already (e.g., SVG), so of course you can just embed that as strings in your source file.

• by perihelions on 12/29/24, 6:35 PM

  I like these kinds of ideas. I've spent a lot of time thinking about similar ones. Here's my rough translation of this particular concept to Emacs:

      (defun imagify-buffer ()
        (interactive)
        (font-lock-ensure)
        (save-excursion
          (goto-char (point-min))
          (while
              (re-search-forward
               (rx "(%image \""
                   (group (1+ (or alphanumeric "+" "/" "=")))
                   "\")")
               nil t)
            (when (equal 'font-lock-comment-face
                         (get-char-property (match-beginning 0) 'face))
              (let* ((replaced-string (match-string 0))
                     (base64 (match-string 1))
                     (image (create-image
                             (base64-decode-string base64)
                             nil t :scale 4.0)))
                (goto-char (match-beginning 0))
                (kill-region (match-beginning 0) (match-end 0))
                (insert-image image replaced-string))))))
      
      (defun insert-image-thingy (filename)
        (interactive "f")
        (let* ((s (with-temp-buffer
                    (set-buffer-multibyte nil)
                    (insert-file-contents-literally filename)
                    (buffer-substring-no-properties (point-min) (point-max))))
               (base64 (base64-encode-string s t))
               (thingy (format ";; (%%image \"%s\")" base64)))
          (insert thingy)
          (imagify-buffer)))
      
      (add-hook 'emacs-lisp-mode-hook #'imagify-buffer)
      (add-hook 'lisp-interaction-mode-hook #'imagify-buffer)
      (imagify-buffer)
      
      ;; (%image "PHN2ZyBoZWlnaHQ9IjE4IiB2aWV3Qm94PSI0IDQgMTg4IDE4OCIgd2lkdGg9IjE4IiB4bWxucz0iaHR0cDovL3d3dy53My5vcmcvMjAwMC9zdmciPjxwYXRoIGQ9Im00IDRoMTg4djE4OGgtMTg4eiIgZmlsbD0iI2Y2MCIvPjxwYXRoIGQ9Im03My4yNTIxNzU2IDQ1LjAxIDIyLjc0NzgyNDQgNDcuMzkxMzAwODMgMjIuNzQ3ODI0NC00Ny4zOTEzMDA4M2gxOS41NjU2OTYzMWwtMzQuMzIzNTIwNzEgNjQuNDg2NjE0Njh2NDEuNDkzMzg1MzJoLTE1Ljk4di00MS40OTMzODUzMmwtMzQuMzIzNTIwNzEtNjQuNDg2NjE0Njh6IiBmaWxsPSIjZmZmIi8+PC9zdmc+")
  
  

  This adaptation hooks onto an Emacs language mode—Emacs Lisp mode, in this snippet—and searches for, and translates, a regex syntax (%image) appearing in the comments section. This piggybacks on the language mode's own parser (the 'font-lock-comment-face thingy). The image-handling part is core Emacs functionality; like DrRacket it does support these things natively.

• by IshKebab on 12/29/24, 10:56 PM

  I really wish IDEs would support showing images inline in code. I can't count the number of times I've wanted to include a nice diagram in a comment but I instead had to resort to describing the diagram with words, or a shitty ASCII art diagram.

  There's a very long standing VSCode issue for this.

  https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/issues/3220

• by WiggleGuy on 12/29/24, 5:15 PM

  Hey, that's my former professor! Hi Shriram!

• by diath on 12/29/24, 5:59 PM

  On a related note, one of the features in TempleOS was images embedded in source code along with an image editor within the code editor: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/196Dv3gFslU

• by Tempest1981 on 12/29/24, 6:04 PM

  Seems clean. Does the Racket IDE already support images?

• by adammarples on 12/29/24, 10:55 PM

  I read the readme, I read all the links. I didn't see a single image. Why are developers like this.