[OT] Any quick pointers on GIMP scripting?
Yargh, this has to be the worst job ever. A client has landed a rush job on
us in that they need about 6GB of TIFF files (from scanned documents)
converted into OCR'd PDF's within the next 3-4 days. Yay.
The problem is the images we've been given are utter cack. Firstly, because
of Kodak's seeming inability to produce decent drivers, the pages are
inexplicably surrounded by huge black borders. Because the papers are all
of different sizes and aspect ratios, there is no way I can do an
ImageMagick/IrfanView batch crop on them. I found the GIMP's autocrop tool
worked perfectly on the sample images I downloaded to my home machine, so
I've set about making a batch process script for it.
Secondly, as well as mixed borders, we also have mixed TIFF formats. Most
of the images are in standard 2-colour Group4 fax compression, but they're
interleaved with 256 colour LZW TIFF's and 24bit colour JPEG TIFF's.
So I'm frantically trying to come up with a script-fu for GIMP that can
take all of this into account. I'm currently attempting to use the glob
plugin to take care of the fact we have around 200 directories full of
images (so it'll process /path/to/images/*/*.tif), although I'm not sure if
the glob in GIMP 2.2.0 supports this (although I'll have access to 2.2.2 at
work).
Secondly, what is a drawable? I've seen vague references to it in the
script-fu guides I've skimmed over, but I am at a loss to see where they
fit into the bigger picture. Do I need to convert a file into a drawable,
run the autocrop on that, and then pipe that into an image somehow?
Thirdly, does anyone know if there's some way to specify a "save this TIFF
in the same format/colour depth you opened it in" option? If not, I can
save all output as full colour LZW's and let Adobe Capture do the
resampling, but it's going to cost a fortune in discspace and I doubt the
client will be happy either.
Sorry to sound like a complete I-don't-know-what-I'm-doing, but I probably
don't I'm chowing my way through HOWTO's in between trying to write the
script as we speak, but would greatly appreciate any advice the community
could give me, if only to be able to get to bed before the sun comes
up Yay for still working at 5am
P.S. if anyone has any other suggestions for applications that'll batch
remove arbitary black borders (be they Linux or Windows, although I don't
have the power to buy stuff myself) they too would be welcome.
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