[texhax] easiest way to process hundreds of screenshots in a book in LaTeX?

[tom sgouros]

Niall Mansfield <texhax at uit.co.uk> wrote:

> I'm working on a book that contains hundreds of screenshots and
> diagrams that will need to be cropped, resized, and occasionally
> have callouts added.  What's the *easiest* way to do this?

Imagemagick (convert, import, etc), Perl (with perlmagick modules) and make.

> How do other people handling very large numbers of graphical inclusions
> without going nuts?

I just finished a 240-page book with 114 screenshots in it.  I didn't
find it possible to automate the capture itself because of
idiosyncrasies of the subject, but the conversion to eps (which probably
could be avoided if I would use pdflatex), the cropping and the
occasional labeling were all done with imagemagick, perl and the
viewport option of includegraphics.

Late in the game, I noticed that I could better eps results with gimp or
another program called samp2f, so I'll probably rely on them more
heavily next time.  (Imagemagick does something funny with the DSC
comments in the output.  I haven't figured out exactly what the problem
was, but some of the psutils utilities didn't like those images.)  You
can run gimp as a command-line filter like convert.

 -tom

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