Date   : Tue, 31 May 2005 23:44:33 +0000
From   : Jules Richardson <julesrichardsonuk@...>
Subject: Re: Picture and thumbnail sizes

On Tue, 2005-05-31 at 23:30 +0100, Jonathan Graham Harston wrote:
> > Message-ID: <1117541234.15141.9.camel@...>
> > Maybe you should play around with whatever options the tools you're
> > using support, or switch to a different bit of software...
>  
> I need a tool I can use FROM THE COMMAND LINE on either RISC OS or
> Windows, and it must be usable from the command line.

There's a version of Imagemagick for Windows as well as Unix. It's free,
and comes with command line tools as well as programming APIs (C, C++,
Java, Perl, PHP, Python, Ruby, and Tcl/Tk).

I've only recently got into playing around with the C API calls; I've
always done stuff from the command line in the past using shell scripts
(I don't do MS Windows :)

Probably a good place to start:

http://www.imagemagick.org/script/command-line-tools.php


The only downside I've ever found with it is that it isn't memory-
efficient with bi-level images, as its model is to promote source images
to 32-bit in memory in order to do any transformations before making any
necessary depth changes and writing output to disk. So if you throw a
whole pile of 600dpi A4 mono page scans at it and ask it to write a pdf
file as output, expect memory consumption to go through the roof :-)

cheers

Jules