Converting multiple Postscript images into an animated gif - animation

I have several postscript images of the form "filename_0001.ps", "filename_0002.ps", etc. I would like to create an animated gif with each of the files as a frame in the animation, but I do not know how I would go about doing that. I have over 500 files that I would like to include in a single gif and would like to avoid creating the animated gif by hand.
I googled around for a bit and found this. At the very bottom it seems to suggest that there is a one line command that can be used to make the gif, but I haven't been able to figure out how to use it in my case.
Any suggestions would be appreciated.

I've used ghostscript and ImageMagick's convert to do this. I used these commands
gs -sDEVICE=png48 -g500x500 -o bezan%03d.png bezanim.ps
convert bezan*.png bezan.gif
to produce this animation for this Codegolf.Stackexchange challenge, where the frames were separate pages of a single postscript program.
You can probably do it with the single command
convert filename_*.ps anim.gif
and convert will shell-out to ghostscript as needed. But for my case, I wanted to specify the arguments to ghostscript directly.

Related

Animated gif image to individual tiff images capturing individual frames

I have a small problem, I have a set of animated gif images. I want to pick individual gif image files, and create multiple tiff images capturing individual frames.
I am looking to do it in Python/Java.
Help would be appreciated!
You can do this easily from the command-line using ImageMagick. It is available for free from here. It has bindings for Perl, C/C++, Python and lots of others. It is ready installed in many Linux distros.
Your command looks like this:
convert -coalesce input.gif %02d.tif
which will produce TIFF format output files, numbered 01.tif, 02.tif etc. according to the frame number.
You can also extract an individual frame, say frame 7, like this:
convert -coalesce input.gif[7] my_favourite.tif
or a sequence of frames, say 3-7 like this:
convert -coalesce input.gif[3-7] frames%02d.tif
Note however, that when you extract individual frames, you may get artefacts depending on how well compressed your original GIF files are - since they sometimes only store DIFFERENCES between frames, so you may be best advised to extract all frames then discard any you don't want.

Ghostscript Stamp Image on PDF

Is there any way to stamp or overlap a tiff image on a existing PDF file and output the result using Ghostscript?
I have two PDF which i want to merge in a result PDF with one over the other using ghostscript. I want to know if this can be done and how, or if it may work with one PDF as tiff image on top of the base PDF.
Can ghostscript make this stamp using layers in the PDF?
Thank you for your answers
The pdfwrite device in Ghostscript doesn't really support layers, so you can't use that. Also its unclear why you think layers would help.
TIFF isn't part of PostScript (or PDF), so you can't directly read a TIFF file into GS. I have elsewhere posted a PostScript program which reads TIFF files and renders them for output. You could use that to read a TIFF file.
However, you would have to mess about with either the PDF interpreter or a custom EndPage procedure in order to read and render the TIFF file. And unless you take specific kinds of action, it will be opaque, which may well not be what you want.
The Ghostscript PDF interpreter doesn't really lend itself to this kind of manipulation, have you considered using pdftk instead ?

Convert SVG to image

How do I convert an svg file to an image using Go ?
I found the amazing svgo library and would like to use it to generate a custom set of playing cards. The idea is to store the text and layout of a card in a text file and then read and process it with go. This would be a huge improvement of my current workflow where I use gimp to edit each individual card. The problem is that I need to have an image of the card for printing. Preferably png since the printing script so far only works with that format. But I could easily adapt it to accept jpeg, too.
Unfortunately svgo doesn't seem to offer export functionality. Can you recommend a go library to convert svg to png ?
One possible strategy is to write your SVG to files and invoke an external tool to convert them. For example, ImageMagick and its related GraphicsMagick will both convert SVG to PNG via command-line options. You would need to use the convert verb, possibly within their batch support if you're converting lots of images at once.
GraphicsMagick has bindings for C and Go and other languages that you could use directly from your Go scripts, although I've not tried this myself.
I can't find a native Go library to do it, but there seems to be a way to convert an HTML canvas element to PNG quite simply in Javascript.
You can therefore output SVG to an HTML canvas element, and then use JS to export to SVG.
See this answer for details.

image not shown in dvi after latexing

I include several images of eps format in latex. After latex command, there are some of the images missing in the dvi file. Not sure if it is related to the image size, most of the images missing have size around 83kB while those shown up have a size less than 40kB. After conversion from dvi to ps, the images are all back. Just wonder what is the reason causing the images missing in dvi file?
Thanks and regards!
As far as I can remember, a dvi viewer cannot show eps file. Just use pdflatex as the front-end instead of latex and view the resulting pdf file.
Checking man xdvi reveals this:
Xdvi can show PostScript specials
by any of three methods. It will try
first to use Display PostScript,
then NeWS, then it will try to
use Ghostscript to render the images. All of these options
depend on additional software to work
properly; moreover, some of them may
not be compiled into this copy of xdvi.
So it would appear to be platform- and/or implementation-dependent.

How to convert an image (i.e. pdf) for use in a LaTeX document?

What is the preferred way to convert various images, bitmap and vector, for use in a LaTeX and PDFLaTeX document?
There are many ways to do this, some make use of standard inclusions in the various LaTeX packages, others give better results.
You can include a PDF image directly into a LaTeX document if you want to produce your final output using pdflatex, but not if you want to produce a dvi file.
pdflatex can use PDF, PNG, and JPEG
latex/dvips can use PS, EPS
See more details:
Including images in LaTeX files
Watch what you name graphics files in LaTeX
I convert bitmaps into PNG, and vector graphics (e.g. SVG) into PDF. pdflatex understand both PNG and PDF.
If you have an image "as PDF", and you don't want to include it as pdf, you may want to extract the complete image data first with pdfimages. Other conversions may render the image only with reduced resolution.
My current preferred way is using bmeps and epstopdf included in MikTeX. For the generation of pdf and eps versions of a png.
In a file called convertimage.bat,
bmeps -p3 -c -e8f -tpng %1.png > %1.eps
epstopdf %1.eps
Use by including in the path and writing convertimage.bat filenameminusextension
Include in the documents using,
\begin{figure}[h]
\begin{center}
\includegraphics[scale=0.25]{path/to/fileminuxextension}
\caption{My caption here}
\label{somelabelforreference}
\end{center}
\end{figure}
I only use Encapsulated PostScript (.eps) figures (converting bitmaps with NetPBM first), since I always use dvips + ps2pdf anyway, and then I do \includegraphics{file}.
As John D. Cook says, your available image formats depend on whether you are using latex or pdflatex.
I find ImageMagick a useful tool for converting images between formats. Handles bitmap images, plus ps/pdf/eps (with ghostscript) and a zillion others. Available through apt, macports, etc.
I use a mac so I use GraphicConverter to load images and export as PDFs.
When I draw diagrams, I use Omnigraffle which lets me export as PDFs.
On windows I used to use Visio which supported EPSs which I also had no problems embedding.
The basic issues are that a) you want to handle raster and vector images differently and b) this introduces potential pitfalls.
The "right" thing to do depends a bit on your final output.
If your final output is going to be a .pdf file, and you don't need pstricks or anything else that these days you're probably better off just using pdflatex to directly produce the file.
In this case:
store all vector figures as .pdf
store all raster figures as .png (or jpeg if they were originally jpeg)
use graphicx package and \includegraphics{filename-without-suffix}
If you don't do the above, your raster figures will be converted to jpegs and may gain compression artifacts. png is the best bet if you can choose output.
If you are headed for .dvi file you're going to want .eps for everything. (You can gzip these files as long as you generate a bounding box file).
If you're careful you can do both. I store all vector figures as (compressed) .eps because there are a few things .pdf can't do that .eps can. I store all raster figures as .png. Using make, I can have temporary copies of these canonical versions generated on the fly for .dvi or .pdf output as needed.
Someone above pointed out the filename issue. You want to avoid "." in the file names, and avoid suffixes always in your latex file itself.
I always include images in PNG format.
If you compile your code with pdflatex, then you also can use the \includegraphics to include images in pdf (you have to include the package graphix

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