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.

use Prima qw(Application Buttons);

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

run Prima;

More screenshots at http://prima.eu.org/big-picture/

apt-get install libgtk-3-dev libgif-dev libjpeg-dev libtiff-dev libxpm-dev libwebp-dev libfribidi-dev libharfbuzz-dev libthai-dev libheif-dev libfreetype-dev

pkg install gtk3 fribidi harfbuzz libxpm libthai pkgconf tiff webp
giflib libheif freetype2 libheif Xrandr libXcomposite libXcursor
libXft fontconfig

zypper install gtk3-devel giflib-devel libjpeg-devel libtiff-devel libXpm-devel libXrandr-devel libXcomposite-devel libXcursor-devel libfribidi-devel libwebp-devel libharfbuzz-devel libthai-devel libheif-devel libfreetype-dev

Download and install Oracle Developer Studio as the vendor-provided perl is compiled with cc, not gcc

• install apt-cyg:

  wget https://raw.githubusercontent.com/transcode-open/apt-cyg/master/apt-cyg -O /usr/bin/apt-cyg

  chmod +x /usr/bin/apt-cyg

• install prerequisites:

  apt-cyg install libgtk3.0-devel libfribidi-devel libgif-devel libjpeg-devel libtiff-devel libXpm-devel libwebp-devel libharfbuzz-devel libthai-devel libheif-devel libfreetype-dev

v5.32 had the necessary libraries included, but v5.38 hasn't. Install these:

• http://prima.eu.org/download/libfribidi-1.0.10-win64.zip
• http://prima.eu.org/download/libthai-0.1.29-win64.zip
• http://prima.eu.org/download/libheif-1.17.6-win64.zip
• http://prima.eu.org/download/libwebp-1.0.2-win64.zip

ActiveState currently doesn't support local compilations. The official answer is here: https://community.activestate.com/t/how-to-install-gcc-and-or-mingw/10993/2 . Consider migrating to Strawberry Perl.

For the older distributions or custom Perl builds, 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 native, cygwin, and mingw/strawberry perl runtimes.

You'll need homebrew, XQuartz, and a set of extra libraries.

• install homebrew:

  /bin/bash -c "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/HEAD/install.sh)"

• install XQuartz:

  brew install --cask xquartz

• install support libraries:

  brew install libiconv libxcomposite libxrandr libxcursor libxft fribidi fontconfig freetype giflib gtk+3 harfbuzz jpeg libpng libtiff webp libxpm libheif

Note: if Prima crashes in libxft, do this: remove libxft and install custom-built xorg libraries, either very minimal

brew install dk/x11/xorg-macros dk/x11/libxft

or linux-homebrew's (not tested)

brew tap linuxbrew/xorg

brew install linuxbrew/xorg/libxft

• install libthai:

  brew install dk/libthai/libthai

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 on all platforms:

• libXpm
• libpng
• libjpeg
• libgif
• libtiff
• libwebp,libwebpdemux,libwebpmux
• libheif

(libheif is not widespread yet. See Prima/Image/heif.pm for details)

• To support bi-directional unicode text input and output you'll need the fribidi library. Additionally for unix builds you'll need the harfbuzz library for output of complex scripts and font ligature support. Prima can compile and work fine without these libraries, but the support of the features will be rather primitive.

• The Thai language doesn't use spaces between the words in a sentence. To wrap Thai texts properly Prima can be compiled with the libthai library. No special treatment of Thai text is needed programmatically, the text wrapper does everything under the hood.

It is recommended to build Prima with GTK3/GTK2 on X11 installations because in that case, Prima will use standard GTK fonts, colors, and file dialogs. By default, Prima tries to build with it, but if you don't want it, run

perl Makefile.PL WITH_GTK2=0 WITH_GTK3=0

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

(the brave souls may run make xtest too)

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 the Installation 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.

Available only for MSWin32. Please use the installation from the 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.

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 in the distribution can be run either by their name or with perl as argument - for example, ..../helloworld or perl ..../helloworld . ( perl ..../helloworld.bat for win32 )

Typical code starts with

use Prima qw(Application);

and ends with

run Prima;

, the event loop. Start with 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;

Alternatively, start the VB program, the toolkit visual builder.

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

Visit http://www.prima.eu.org/ for the recent versions of the toolkit. You can use github.com/dk/Prima to keep in touch. See the Prima homepage for details.

Online documentation at MetaCPAN: https://metacpan.org/dist/Prima/view/Prima.pm

Printable documentation: http://prima.eu.org/download/Prima.pdf

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

(c) 1997-2024 Dmitry Karasik

• Dmitry Karasik dmitry@karasik.eu.org

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