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Trying out the Apress e-book system

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Full disclosure: I am currently writing a book for Apress. As an Apress author Apress asked me to check out the Apress e-book online catalog thingie. They threw in a free e-book as an incentive, so I thought I should give it a try. I've done a fair few book reviews for AUUG / Woodslane over the last couple of years, so it seemed like a good idea to look further into this e-book thing anyway. Especially as I have a garage full of books that I occasionally need as references, but don't have the space to store in the house, especially with two small kids who like to draw in books around. So, I picked a book in their online catalog, and said I'd like to buy it. I entered the discount code, and was good to go until they noticed that I didn't have an online account in their system. So, I had to stop my "purchase" and make one. Which meant that my place was lost in the purchase, as I had to wait for a confirmation email to arrive, and then click on a link in that email which didn't have the stage I was up…

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Some details about the publication process

Pascal asked in the comments to a previous post about the book about how I was going about writing the book and how the publication process works. It's a good question, and something I meant to cover here anyway, so now seems like a good time. I'll start from the beginning with a brief summary of how I got started with this writing thing. I started off by writing a number of articles for IBM DeveloperWorks. DeveloperWorks are actually really good to work with, all I did to start writing from them was fill in the proposal web form within a couple of hours we'd sorted out what was happening, and off we went. The ImageMagick articles I wrote turned out to be quite popular with the ImageMagick people. I suspect that's why the editor for Apress, a lovely guy named Matt contacted me. He pitched the book to me, and I was originally hesitant. He spent a fair bit of time (a month?) discussing the project with me, and I ended up deciding that because it's fairly closely aligned with the imaging work I'm doing for my PhD, I ended up saying yes. Along the way I wrote a…

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Chapter seven of the shop manual

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"As he stared at her ample bosom, he daydreamed of the dual Stromberg carburettors in his vintage Triumph Spitfire, highly functional yet pleasingly formed, perched prominently on top of the intake manifold, aching for experienced hands, the small knurled caps of the oil dampeners begging to be inspected and adjusted as described in chapter seven of the shop manual" ABC coverage of the bad writing contest from San Jose University. [icbm: home]

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Converting a bunch of TIFF images to a PDF using ImageMagick

I just got this question in email, and thought I should answer it publically to help other people who might be wondering: I used following commands to convert D:\>convert -adjoin scanImage_1.tif -adjoin scanImage_2.tif -adjoin scanImage_3.tif three.pdf This didn't work. And I use D:\ >convert -adjoin scanImage_1.tif -adjoin scanImage_2.tif -adjoin scanImage_3.tif three.tif And convert three.tif three.pdf Did not work. Then I use D:\ >convert three.tif three.pdf Did not work How do I create single pdf file? As far as ImageMagick is concerned, a PDF file is simply a format capable of storing more than one image in a file. TIFF files are another example, as are animations. Therefore, to turn multiple TIFF files into a single PDF, you just need a command line like this: convert scanImage_1.tif scanImage_2.tif scanImage_3.tif three.pdf Too easy. Obligatory advertising: you can find out more about this in chapter three of my upcoming ImageMagick book, which is slated to be released around Christmas.

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ImageMagick book – Chapter 1: Installation and Configuration

I want to talk about the chapter I'm currently writing, but in order to do that in a way which makes sense, I really need to mention the chapters which are already written. Well, it makes sense to me at least, and this is my site, so I guess I get to do that if I want. Chapter 1 of the book covers installation and configuration of ImageMagick on a variety of platforms including various Linux distributions, FreeBSD, and Windows. I didn't cover MacOS, as I figured that most people who care will know how to use Fink, and I don't have access to a Macintosh to write anything on. I'll write a summary of the other chapters I've already finished writing soon.

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The architecture of PerlMagick

Steven comments on the slowness of PerlMagick in the EXIF tag extraction case. I'm pretty sure that it's not forking a process though -- ImageMagick is now a set of libraries which are wrapped to make the command line utilities we all know and love, as well as PerlMagick. So, I don't think a fork is involved. I think what is happening here is that ImageMagick is suffering from it's own generic (and therefore very powerful nature). In return for being able to do heaps of things with heaps of image formats, you get a block of code which simply as efficient as possible in all cases. I haven't done a code audit to determine if this is the case in this specific incident however. So, I think PerlMagick is innocent here. [tags: perlmagick image jpeg exif perl cgi]

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ImageMagick slowness extracting EXIF information from JPEG files

For the book I've been working on a PerlMagick example which takes a directory of images, lets you rotate and label the images, and the publish them to a list of different possible publication directories. It's basically an automation of what I've done with the image publication for this site for some time, but also deuglificated. It also does some nice stuff like display relevant EXIF information for the JPEG files in the HTML pages that it generates, which will be nicer than the igal stuff I currently use. Yes, I am aware that gallery does a lot of this now, but I need an example for the book, and this gives me a chance to write up exactly what I do now in a nicer form, and make it well documented so that people have a basis for something to hack on in the future. One of the things that the script does if it hasn't been told how to rotate an image, it tries to guess by looking at the EXIF tags for the images. This presents a problem with the beta version of the code, which I am testing with the photos I took from Andrew's wedding.…

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