Re: Problem with tif images captured from a scanner

From: Madhusudan Singh (spammers-go-here_at_spam.invalid)
Date: 10/23/04 

Date: Sat, 23 Oct 2004 15:17:56 -0400

Dances With Crows wrote:

>>> If I try to view these tif files, with xv, it quits with segmentation
>>> fault. kuickview does show the images but with a slew of errors in
>>> the console log.
>
> I'll bet this isn't because of the tags, but because of the 16
> bits/sample thing. Support for 16-bit images is kind of uncertain right
> now, since most of the time, 8 bits/sample is plenty and only high-end
> photographile weenies (who are stuck with 'Doze/OS X *anyway*) really
> need/use anything more.

You were right. Point noted for the next time I scan stuff.

>
> If you really want to get rid of extraneous TIFF tags, there isn't much
> out there. I've put together a set of functions using the code from
> tiffdump that might do the job, but they're sort of special-cased right
> now for working with a set of undocumented tags used by a commercial
> program. I've had reasonable luck by using tifftopnm followed by
> convert with some options to convert that regenerate the resolution and
> units tags. You might even be able to use tiffcp. I don't think the
> tifftopnm thing will work on 16-bit images though.
>
>> Have you tried loading the tif files into The Gimp, and saving them as
>> png? I have no idea if that will work, but worth a shot.
>
> If GIMP can handle 16-bit images, this will probably work. You'll want
> to use GIMP 2.0, naturally. HTH,
>

Thanks for the suggestion. I upgraded from version 1.2.3 to 2.0. When I
loaded the tif files, I got a message stating that Gimp does not support 16
bits per channel but would convert it. Neat. Saved them as PNG files with
the gimp defaults (apparently the compression level now is 9 instead of 6).

The end result is that the mess in the bookmarks, though far reduced, still
exists. The 2nd and 3rd chapters are still shown (in PDF bookmarks alone)
below the hierarchy of chapter 1.