[pdftex] Best bitmap image format?

Hans Hagen pragma at wxs.nl
Sun Feb 26 20:23:50 CET 2006


gnwiii at gmail.com wrote
> ImageMagick does RGB to CMYK, and also (when built with lcms) ICC
> profiles, so in the rare cases that an image doesn't need other
> touch-ups it is possible to avoid the editor.
>   
sure, and we use image magick a lot (given its scripting features it's a 
kind of scriptable editor -)

in the cases that image magick fails us, i tweak the pdf's afterwards

(im cannot [easily] deal with more complex demands, like creating duo 
tones and such but we deal with that at a different level anyway
> Inclusion of pdf is not only faster, it is reliable.  Pdftex is not an
> image processing application, and there are many more people doing
> image processing than have heard of TeX.  In my work it is far better
> to deal with conversion issues on an image-by-image basis where you
> can choose between jpeg or lossless (LZW) compression, color-space
> compression, changes in resolution, etc. according to the image
> contents.   I suppose someone doing a catalog with 1000's of images
> with similar characteristics can't afford the image editor step.
>   
indeed; although, when dealing with large quantities, we sometimes make 
conversion decisions bases on a rough analysis (resolution, colors, 
etc); it also makes sense to use low res lossy in pre-production runs 
because it's no fun to work with 500 meg pdf files
> The rush is, however,  _ON_ to support more bits-per-pixel and image
> metadata (like geotiff).   People need to interact with images in
> electronic documents (pick geographic locations in georeferenced
> images, zoom in on a selected region without zooming the whole page,
> adjust brightness and contrast for individual images).  Will pdf-2
> support this?  Imagine the conventional atlases being replaced by
> electronic versions with a Google Earth type of interface but much
> more metadata.
>   
i think that these things are posibble already with the right plugins and (pdf multi media features); i think that the biggest problem there is the lack of robust standards and implementations (for instance, one can do nice things with movie files, including scripting and panoramic things; unfortunately the plugin has limited support (long ago i played with kind of three dimensional documents created by tex, converted to movies etc but could not get hyperlinks working -) 

(nothing prevents one to come up with pdf viewers on top of gs or xpdf that provide such features, but i'm rather pessimistics; take pdf widgets: so far no one made an extension for gs, at least not that i know of). 

Hans 

-----------------------------------------------------------------
                                          Hans Hagen | PRAGMA ADE
              Ridderstraat 27 | 8061 GH Hasselt | The Netherlands
     tel: 038 477 53 69 | fax: 038 477 53 74 | www.pragma-ade.com
                                             | www.pragma-pod.nl
-----------------------------------------------------------------



More information about the pdftex mailing list