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

[David Woolley <david@djwhome.demon.co.uk>]

> 
> 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.