Recent changes to feature-requests

BSD Compilation

Anonymous — Sun, 16 Oct 2005 13:40:13 -0000

I'm trying to persuade this software to work under
FBSD. So far, I've run into required header files that
aren't in the same places, ones where the Makefile
lists Redhat-specific locations, inclusions of header
files within the code which simply don't exist,
depricated use of malloc.h, ... It's not working yet.

At this point, my best guess is that I will have to
manually change all the includes throughout it to
reflect the system architecture. While having to
change one or two files for BSD is quite common, facing
this level of incompatibility is quite rare. Based on
some of the header locations listed in the Makefile, I
doubt this would even work out-of-the-box on any Linux
other than Redhat.

This is the only software I've been able to find for
this purpose, so I'm really looking forward to getting
it working. There are many OCR suites, but a system
purely for preperatory image manipulation is a fabulous
idea. I just hope it won't be more work to get it
running than it would have been to rewrite it entirely.

-- Sorel
feonixrift@gmail.com

add command line only interface

Paul K. Young — Tue, 22 Jun 2004 01:38:19 -0000

Add a command line interface that doesn't require the
use of a script file. For instance, the user could run the
following:

tifftool foo.tif -orthrot 90 foo2.tif

tifftool foo.tif -orthrot 270 -deskew -clean foo2.tif

add -help -version and -license to command line interface

Paul K. Young — Tue, 22 Jun 2004 01:31:34 -0000

add -help -version and -license to command line interface

-help displays usage information (limited for now)
-version displays the current version of tifftool
-license displays the GPL licensing of tifftool

add a scale function

Paul K. Young — Tue, 22 Jun 2004 01:29:27 -0000

Add a function to scale an image up or down. Non-
integer scale factors should be supported. Scaling
independently in the x and y dimensions should be
allowed.

The user should be able to select whether the dpi is
affected. Hence the scale function could be used for
upsampling/downsampling (dpi varies) or for changing
the physical size of an image (dpi fixed).

Suggested interface:

scale 0.5 2.0

scales the x by 1/2 and y by 2 without changing the dpi

sample 0.5 4.0

downsamples the x by 1/2 and upsamples the y by 4
with no changes to the overall (physical) size of the

single-paramater versions of both commands should
exist, and would be interpreted as a scale/sampling in
both the x and y dimensions.

add a downsampling function

Paul K. Young — Tue, 22 Jun 2004 01:21:10 -0000

The downsampling should work independently for width
and height.

Suggested approach. A simple downsample could select
every nth row/column and will likely be the first
implementation of downsample.

add an except clause to the for loop

Paul K. Young — Tue, 22 Jun 2004 01:16:40 -0000

add skip command or exception clause in loops, IE

for i from 1 to 500 except [3,17,41] do
od

for i from 1 to 500 do
skip i in [3,17,41]
od

This way it is possible to have special processing on
these pages without wasting time performing the default
processing.

make measurements uniform

Paul K. Young — Tue, 22 Jun 2004 01:12:51 -0000

Make measurement specifications uniform, both in
the "set" commands and in the function parameters.

default = pixels, with centimeters & inches possible

600, 1i, 1in, 2.54c, 2.54cm all mean (approx) the same
thing (NB pixels of course depends on scan resolution
whereas the others are absolute)

change the names of some variables/functions

Paul K. Young — Tue, 22 Jun 2004 01:10:00 -0000

The short list of function names that need to be
changed:

dumb_despeckle -> despeckle
dumb_fill -> fill
dumb_despeckle_and_fill -> enhance

fudge -> padding
dirty -> ???

auto-trim black boundaries of pages

Paul K. Young — Tue, 22 Jun 2004 00:48:09 -0000

Currently the user must specify fixed insets to crop out
any black boundaries around the pages. These black
boundries should be automatically detected and
removed.

Suggested approach: implement a trim function that
optionally takes hints about the expected size of the
text area and the overall page size.

auto-split 2 on 1 pages

Paul K. Young — Tue, 22 Jun 2004 00:42:54 -0000

Implement a function for detecting and splitting two
pages on one scanned image. One must also implement
a way to set variables and call functions for the right
and left half separately after the split has occurred. A
suggested approach:

for i from 1 to 100 do
read foo.%4d.tif
orthrot 90
split
on left do
set lpad = 1in
align center center
write foo.%4d-left.tif
od
on right do
set lpad = 0.5in
align center center
write foo.%04d-right.tif
od
od