opengl: Trouble setting up viewport and glortho - opengl

Question

I am trying to setup my OpenGL views for some texture rendering. Following some advice on the forum, I set up my viewport and ortho matrix as follows:
First I try to compute the screen width and height that I can use while maintaining the aspect ratio of my image:
void resize(int w, int h)
{
float target_aspect_ratio = image_width / image_height;
width = w;
height = (int)(width / target_aspect_ratio + 0.5f);
if (height > h) {
height = h;
width = (int)(height * target_aspect_ratio + 0.5f);
}
off_x = (w - width)/2.f;
off_y = (h - height)/2;
// I want to center my image. So I have these offsets
glViewport(off_x, off_y, width, height);
glMatrixMode(GL_PROJECTION);
glLoadIdentity();
glOrtho(0, width, 0, height, 0.0f, 1.0f);
Now when I want to render my texture I do:
void paint()
{
// texture binding etc.
glTexCoord2f(0, 0); glVertex2f(0, 0);
glTexCoord2f(1, 0); glVertex2f(width, 0);
glTexCoord2f(1, 1); glVertex2f(width, height);
glTexCoord2f(0, 1); glVertex2f(0, height);
}
However, this does not show the image as expected. It does not maintain the aspect ratio as I size the screen. It is almost like the glViewport has no effect and I can verify this function gets called every time my window is resized.
Update:
It is strange. Almost as if these calls have no effect. I even did something as:
_off_x = _off_y = 0;
_width = 500;
_height = 500;
So I expected the viewport to be lower left box of my screen but the image is being drawn as before basically using the whole screen as the viewport.
Update 2:
Ok, so if I call
glViewport(_off_x, _off_y, _width, _height);
glMatrixMode(GL_PROJECTION);
glLoadIdentity();
glOrtho(0, _width, 0, _height, 0, 1);
in my paint events, it works as expected! However, I thought it was enough to put this in the resize event handler.

Answer 1

Before start drawing, you need to switch your Matrix mode to GL_MODELVIEW. You don't need to set your projection matrix inside your render function at each frame.
glMatrixMode(GL_MODELVIEW);
glLoadIdentity();
Here is a detailed analysis that I wrote about glMatrixMode() function modes :
OpenGL glMatrixMode(GL_PROJECTION) vs glMatrixMode(GL_MODELVIEW)