Posts Tagged ‘netpbm’

demented tiles for demented people

Sunday, September 28th, 2008

I’d totally put these up on my walls, but I may end up climbing them:

I made them by taking 32×32 pixel tiles of random grey noise, Atkinson dithering them (using pamditherbw) then vectorizing them using potrace. If you click on the tiles, you can download/view the PDF source of each.

(pgmnoise, the source of the grey noise, relies heavily on the system time as its seed. Before I introduced a delay between image generation, several images appeared almost identical.)

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an appropriate use of company time

Friday, August 15th, 2008 
$ pbmtext Hello | pnmcrop | pnmtopnm -plain | tail +3 | tr '01' ' #'
###  ###       ## ##
 #    #         #  #
 #    #         #  #
 #    #    ##   #  #   ##
 ######   #  #  #  #  #  #
 #    #   ####  #  #  #  #
 #    #   #     #  #  #  #
 #    #   ##  # #  #  #  #
###  ###   ### ######  ##

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Lady Goosepelt Rides Again!

Sunday, August 19th, 2007

Lady Goosepelt, from What a Life!

In case anyone wants them, the 600 dpi page images of What a Life! are stored in this PDF: what_a_life.pdf (16MB). If you merely wish to browse, all the images from the book are here.

I got a bit carried away with doing this. Instead of just smacking together all the 360 dpi TIFFs I scanned seven years ago, I had to scan a new set at a higher resolution, then crop them, then fix the page numbers, add chapter marks, and make the table of contents a set of live links.

I’ve got out of the way of thinking in PostScript, so I spent some time looking for tools that would do things graphically. Bah! These things’d cost a fortune, so armed only with netpbm, libtiff, ghostscript, the pdfmark reference, Aquamacs, awk to add content based on the DSC, and gimp to work out the link zones on the contents page, I made it all go. Even I’m impressed.

One thing that didn’t impress me, though:

aquamacs file size warning

I used to edit multi-gigabyte files with emacs on Suns. They never used to complain like this. They just loaded (admittedly fairly slowly) and let me do my thing. Real emacs don’t give warning messages.

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