Posted by: Anonymous Coward
on January 07, 2007 07:00 AM
+10. I'd say the same. I haven't used GM - but tried IM. And I found it to be pretty buggy and poorly documented.
NetPBM though primitive, does its job.
On several occasions I have tried to compile IM by myself and after many wasted hours just given up on that stinking pile of [self-censored]. Thankfully, I was hinted to try NetPBM and soon discovered that it could do nearly 100% of what I ever needed. (*) It doesn't pretend to be complete, integrated, all-in-one or anything - it just allows me to do the job. And it is well documented and ported to uncounted number of platforms.
I sincerely hope something have changed in IM land in last five years I haven't used it. (Recalling size of code base I'm not holding my breath - it is easier to reimplement it from scratch). But it's just hard to beat the overwhelming simplicity and convenience provided by netpbm.
(*) netpbm is missing font rendering I though would be required. But as later turned out, UI designers of application were strongly against giving programmers control over how the output rendered. IOW, the only unique for application feature of ImageMagik - font rendering - was not needed. And using netpbm with bitmaps prerendered by designers I could compose any image required right on runtime.
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Re:Try NetPBM suite before you choose
Posted by: Anonymous Coward on January 07, 2007 07:00 AMNetPBM though primitive, does its job.
On several occasions I have tried to compile IM by myself and after many wasted hours just given up on that stinking pile of [self-censored]. Thankfully, I was hinted to try NetPBM and soon discovered that it could do nearly 100% of what I ever needed. (*) It doesn't pretend to be complete, integrated, all-in-one or anything - it just allows me to do the job. And it is well documented and ported to uncounted number of platforms.
I sincerely hope something have changed in IM land in last five years I haven't used it. (Recalling size of code base I'm not holding my breath - it is easier to reimplement it from scratch). But it's just hard to beat the overwhelming simplicity and convenience provided by netpbm.
(*) netpbm is missing font rendering I though would be required. But as later turned out, UI designers of application were strongly against giving programmers control over how the output rendered. IOW, the only unique for application feature of ImageMagik - font rendering - was not needed. And using netpbm with bitmaps prerendered by designers I could compose any image required right on runtime.
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