Minor bug with Aperio Images with fractional objectives

[Benjamin Gilbert]

On Wed, Mar 23, 2016 at 05:36:18AM +0000, Derek Magee via openslide-users wrote:
> At the end of the day a) it's not a huge issue for me personally, b) Does
> it hurt to parse non-integer objectives correctly?

It's not necessarily obvious what is correct here.

The difference between aperio.AppMag and openslide.objective-power is that
the latter is validated and canonicalized.  There are three options for how
we can handle the non-integer case:

- Decide that non-integer AppMags are invalid, and decline to expose them
  through openslide.objective-power.  This is what we do now.

- Expose non-integer AppMags through objective-power but round off to
  integer.  In this case we would be actively corrupting the data read from
  the file.  OpenSlide tries not to do that.

- Expose non-integer AppMags as floating-point openslide.objective-power.
  Existing programs parsing that property with atoi() or strtol() will,
  respectively, corrupt the value, or fail.

If there's a commonly-used tool, or a lens, that produces files with
non-integer AppMag, I'm willing to revisit the issue (by implementing the
third option, probably for every slide format).  However, if the vendor's
software is truncating non-integer AppMags to integer, that implies that a
non-integer AppMag is actually invalid: the vendor's software is probably
parsing it with atoi() or equivalent.

--Benjamin Gilbert