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

[Hartmut Henkel]

Hi Laurent and Karl,

On Thu, 19 Dec 2013, Karl Berry wrote:

>     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.

...but pdftex & luatex support native JBIG2 bitonal image inclusion,
just in the same way as shown above (extension .jb2 or .jbig2). JBIG2 is
ideal if one wants e. g. to put many b/w scans into a pdf file with very
high data compression. According to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JBIG2,
this image type "typically generates files one third to one fifth the
size of Fax Group 4", which is the TIFF-G4 contents.

Regards, Hartmut