Hold the scanners

[Jules Richardson]

On Fri, 2004-11-12 at 23:35 +0000, Antonio Carlini wrote:
> A lot of the work can be automated. Converting the TIFFs to
> G4-TIFF (if needed) and then producing a PDF can all be
> done with ImageMagik and various other tools. But you need
> to know where document A begins and ends, unless you fancy
> going through large pdf documents, pulling out doc-A and
> then doc-B and then doc-C ...

I've always sworn by Imagemagick for the last few years, but have
recently discovered a nice gotcha in reading multi-page 1bpp TIFF
images. Imagemagick doesn't efficiently handle low-bpp images - it
always upgrades everything to 24bpp internally before writing out, even
if the output format doesn't need it. 

So here I am trying to convert a 22 page TIFF image to individual
images, and Imagemagick is eating up 400MB of RAM and 17GB of disk cache
to do it. Ouch. Worth remembering that it's not always the most
efficient thing when it comes to image handling...

cheers

Jules