[Insight-users] Difference between VTK and FLTK

[Luis Ibanez]

Hi Jessica,

VTK is a visualization library, it provides classes for
representing surfaces and volumetric data sets, and display
them in different styles. It is ideal for doing surface
renderings and volume renderings. VTK does not provides GUI
functionalities, e.g. you cannot create a "button" or a
"slider" with VTK.

FLTK is a GUI library, not a visualization library. FLTK
provides buttons, sliders, browsers, icons, dials, text
inputs and selectors among other widgets. You can only do
very primitive visualization using FLTK, actually you do
it by inserting your own OpenGL code... which is not really
using FLTK after all.


In practice you may want to combine both toolkits.

As you will see in many of the demo applications in
InsightApplications, we actually combine:

           ITK  +   FLTK  +  VTK

ITK:  does image processing and analysis
VTK:  does visualization
FLTK: does GUI


You are strongly encouraged to read the first session
of the tutorials:

    http://www.itk.org/HTML/Tutorials.htm

In particular GettingStartedI :
http://www.itk.org/CourseWare/Training/GettingStartedI-WebPage/img0.html
would have pre-emptively answered your question



Regards,


   Luis



-------------------
Jessica Ford wrote:

> Hello:
> 
> I hope this is not a stupid question, but what is the difference between 
> VTK and FLTK? Both seem to be some sort of visualization tool.
> 
> Jessica
> 
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