[tex-eplain] PNG and TIFF-G4 bitmaps in plain TeX

[Karl Berry]

Hi Laurent,

    I have not wrestled with the somewhat obscure command
    syntax for pdfTeX

Well, it's not *too* obscure :) --

  \immediate\pdfximage width<dimen> {foo.png}
  \pdfrefximage\pdflastximage

will scale foo.png to the given width.
Or height<dimen>, of course.  (I do this all the time.)
Any supported image type (jpg and pdf being the most common others) can
be handled that way.

However, for more complicated operations, such as reflection, clipping,
etc., using the LaTeX packages as Oleg mentioned is the way to go.

Regarding tiff, pdftex does not support it.  At one time there were too
many conflicting specifications for tiff variants, so support was simply
removed.  I've never heard of tiff-g4 specifically; if it's stable, I
suppose support could be added, but someone will need to write the
patch, as neither Thanh nor I are likely to write it from scratch.  I
don't know if luatex supports it.

dvipdfmx is widely used these days.

Hope this helps,
Karl