Re: ImageMagik PDF manipulation rotate, thumbnail, problems

On Tue, Dec 4, 2012 at 2:55 PM, Suvayu Ali <fatkasuvayu+linux(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: > I agree with you that pdftk is excellent for manipulating pdfs, but why > do you say "ImageMagick is rarely the right option anyway"? I use it > all the time to manipulate images (jpg, png, etc); it seems to work > quite well. Please do not take my query the wrong way, I'm just curious > what you think ImageMagick lacks. As with everything, there are pros and cons to each approach. ImageMagick tries to do everything, which results in an ever increasing complexity of invocation. Further, if it doesn't do what you want, there's very little you can do about it. Compare that with netpbm, which is just a traditional Unix pipeline. If it doesn't do what you want, you can always add an extra transformation in the middle of the pipeline. Netpbm will often give better quality output (for example, correct gamma scaling). Somewhat counter intuitively, netpbm turns out to be faster than ImageMagick for many operations, too, despite having to create more processes and pipe data between them. That said, ImageMagick provides some niceties like -gravity. Sure, you can do it with netpbm, but it requires a script to calculate the correct offsets, where ImageMagick provides the functionality out of the box.