ImageMagik PDF manipulation rotate, thumbnail, problems

[Suvayu Ali]

Hello Tethys,

On Tue, Dec 04, 2012 at 03:26:11PM +0000, Tethys wrote:
> On Tue, Dec 4, 2012 at 2:55 PM, Suvayu Ali <fatkasuvayu+linux at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> > I agree with you that pdftk is excellent for manipulating pdfs, but why
> > do you say "ImageMagick is rarely the right option anyway"?  I use it
> > all the time to manipulate images (jpg, png, etc); it seems to work
> > quite well.  Please do not take my query the wrong way, I'm just curious
> > what you think ImageMagick lacks.
> 
> As with everything, there are pros and cons to each approach.
> ImageMagick tries to do everything, which results in an ever
> increasing complexity of invocation. Further, if it doesn't do what
> you want, there's very little you can do about it. Compare that with
> netpbm, which is just a traditional Unix pipeline. If it doesn't do
> what you want, you can always add an extra transformation in the
> middle of the pipeline. Netpbm will often give better quality output
> (for example, correct gamma scaling). Somewhat counter intuitively,
> netpbm turns out to be faster than ImageMagick for many operations,
> too, despite having to create more processes and pipe data between
> them. That said, ImageMagick provides some niceties like -gravity.
> Sure, you can do it with netpbm, but it requires a script to calculate
> the correct offsets, where ImageMagick provides the functionality out
> of the box.
> 

Thanks for the clarification.  I'll take a look at netpbm.

:)

-- 
Suvayu

Open source is the future. It sets us free.