Hello Neil,

I'm not sure that Gimp is the right tool, if you want some thing lighter then ImageMagic. I would try VIPS [1], its optimized for speed and low memory use [2]. Wikipedia changed form ImageMagic to VIPS last year. [3]

Regards Tobias

[1] http://www.vips.ecs.soton.ac.uk/index.php?title=VIPS [2] http://www.vips.ecs.soton.ac.uk/index.php?title=Speed_and_Memory_Use [3]
https://blog.wikimedia.org/2013/09/12/vipsscaler-implementation-wikimedia-sites/

2014-08-29 8:19 GMT+02:00 Neil Youngman :

I'm looking for an efficient command line method to add header text into fax documents.

This can be done with ImageMagick, but it's painfully slow and uses far too much memory if it's a large fax (tens or hundreds of pages). I'm wondering if GIMP script mode might help. My immediate impression is that GIMP is not a good tool for the job.

The problems I see are:

1. The FAQ says that the image type for TIFF must be RGB, but fax is monochrome.
2. The faxg3 and tiff functions to load and save do not offer an obvious way to handle 1 page at a time and the memory requirement to load hundreds of pages would be excessive.
3. Although group 3 compression is supported there is no obvious way to save an image as black and white.

I'm not familiar with GIMP, so it may be that I just haven't found the right functions. Can it handle monochrome, multi-page fax and do so efficiently?

Neil Youngman
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Gesendet: Freitag, 29. August 2014 um 08:19 Uhr Von: "Neil Youngman"

I'm looking for an efficient command line method to add header text into fax documents.

This can be done with ImageMagick, but it's painfully slow and uses far too much memory if it's a large fax (tens or hundreds of pages).

You're using the Q8 version of ImageMagick? "too much memory consume" was a frequent complaint of Q16 users.

I've successfully deployed GraphicsMagick to fax servers for similar tasks for years, and have never seen problems like this - only very few of them had to handle fax messages with more than 20 pages, though.

Preferring GM over IM was due to my somewhat mixed experience with IM in the past, as the latter's random features per release were starting to annoy me. I haven't kept up with its overall performance and development in the past 8 years, however.

Regards,
Michael
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On 29/08/2014 14:57, Michael Schumacher wrote:

Gesendet: Freitag, 29. August 2014 um 08:19 Uhr Von: "Neil Youngman"
I'm looking for an efficient command line method to add header text into fax documents.

This can be done with ImageMagick, but it's painfully slow and uses far too much memory if it's a large fax (tens or hundreds of pages).

You're using the Q8 version of ImageMagick? "too much memory consume" was a frequent complaint of Q16 users.

I've successfully deployed GraphicsMagick to fax servers for similar tasks for years, and have never seen problems like this - only very few of them had to handle fax messages with more than 20 pages, though.

Preferring GM over IM was due to my somewhat mixed experience with IM in the past, as the latter's random features per release were starting to annoy me. I haven't kept up with its overall performance and development in the past 8 years, however.

GraphicsMagick looks almost perfect. It's much more efficient than ImageMagick and it does almost everything I need. One feature doesn't seem to do what I expect, but if I can't get it to work, I can work around it.

Thanks for that pointer.

Neil Youngman