Re: flexfax: multi-image tiff -> PDF?

[Darrell Berry <darrell@ku24.com>]

thnx for your help...turns out they ARE the same library (for my ignorance of
this i blame having the fax server on a RH5.1 machine, and having installed
via RPM, which rather hides the provenance on the code ;-)

as for instabilities, i've yet to see any, tho your info makes me wary in
advance!

and as for the 'cropping to the bottom' issue, turns out there is a patch for
tiff2ps whih works beautifully!

thanks again for your help!

David Woolley wrote:

> >
> > i've found a package called tifflib, which generates higher quality, and
> > much faster-rendering (tho larger) PostScript from TIFFs...its located
> > at
> >
> > http://kubax9.kub.nl:2080/Decomate-1.0/tiff-v3.4-tar.gz
>                                          ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
>
> The name looks remarkably like the TIFF library that's needed to build
> Hylafax, and the tiff2ps in Hylafax.  If it is not, the filename clashes.
> I would be rather wary about getting it from the URL given, rather than
> the canonical, or another well known site.
>
> TIFF should code to Postscript with no loss of information, so if there
> are quality differences, you should be worrying about bugs in one or
> the other program.
>
> >
> > and its rather cool (worth a look!)
> >
> > and GhostView 5.50 has a nice ps2pdf filter...chaining the two together
> > generates very high quality PDF fax images...
>
> The ps2pdf processing of images is unstable in version 5.50, although
> that in GS 5.10 supports no compression at all.  In particular,
> pdf2ps (ps2pdf ()) aborts, and trying to force JPEG encoding causes a
> memory fault; if it doesn't memory fault, the PDF seems acceptable to
> Acrobat, even though it breaks ghostscript.  There is no sign of
> acknowledgement of my bug reports, so I don't think GS is getting any
> development effort at present.  GS 5.50 requires distiller parameters
> to be inserted into the PS to get compression.  Neither supports fax G3
> coding, which would be the obvious choice in this case.
>
> >
> > --
> >
> > the only problem (and one shared with fax2ps), is that partial pages are
> > 'bottom-justified' on the page, which will no doubt look a little odd to
> > our users, who are used to fax machines 'top-justifying' partiial pages
> > (ie cover pages etc which take up less than a full A4 image appear at
> > the top of the page, not the bottom, as they do with both fax2ps and
> > tiff2ps)...
> >
> > do you have any clue as to hacking the image or ps output to change
> > this?
>
> If you have accurate bounding box (rather than full page bounding box)
> information in the Postscript, it should be simple to add postscript
> translation operators to move the image; see the Postscript red book.