Better indexing on bitsavers

[Jules Richardson]

On Fri, 2005-05-20 at 09:55 -0700, vrs wrote:
> > It's *could* - problem I've always found is that tools to handle multi-
> > image TIFF files are pretty thin on the ground; they either don't bother
> > at all (and assume one image per file) or they try and buffer the whole
> > lot into memory (for 100 A4 page scans in one file, that's Not A Good
> > Thing). Only about 20% of tools I've come across over the years actually
> > try and handle TIFFs properly (as I've said in the past, even
> > Imagemagick isn't great because it buffers data to 32-bit colourspace in
> > memory regardless of the actual images' bit depth)
> 
> The spectacular badness of TIFF viewers (at least at the free-as-in-beer
> level) is why I prefer PDFs.  Despite their problems, the PDF viewers seem
> *way* better at rendering (and printing) the pages.  (Though I am sure there
> are other platforms which have no decent PDF viewer.)

Acrobat seems to be the only one under Linux that works well with PDFs
full of image scans, but the fact that Adobe have bloated it out to
nearly 100MB for the viewer has annoyed me somewhat.

Ghostscript doesn't seem to render with particularly good quality, and
all the other viewers I've tried seem rather incapable of dealing with
the physical size of PDF files that are wrapping document scans (I
assume it's another one of those situations where they're trying to
buffer the whole damn file into memory at once)

Presumably other Unix platforms suffer the same problems as they're
largely reliant on the same tools.  

How Adobe mange to make Acrobat eat up 100MB of space is beyond me
though... :-(

I can't say I've found many bad TIFF viewers for single images though
(on any platform); it's only when multiple images are put into the same
file that a lot of tools start falling over.

cheers

Jules