Baslinux mailing list

[sindi keesan <keesan AT sdf.lonestar.org>]

On Sun, 4 Mar 2007, Samual Acorn wrote:

> gmail may have enlarged the images by increasing the quality settings
> of the jpeg encoder on conversion in an attempt to reduce loss of
> quality from converting from a lossy format and back.... they seemed
> to be jpeg to begin with .. the ones in the doc have JFIF headers when
> looking at the file with a plain text editor -- youll need vim or dos
> edit to see them (search for 'JFIF') binary files seem to give pico
> indigestion....

I found (I think it was with less) four occurrences of JFIF in among 
the upper ascii.  I looked more carefully and saw one http://.......html 
followed by INCLUDEPICTURE http://......jpg (one reference to an image at 
another site) and three other JFIFs that were not https.  I had just 
assumed the images were all of the same type when antiword found four 
[pic].  MS seems to assume everyone has broadband, always on.

So urlview and catdoc did right to extract only two URLs and 
INCLUDEPICTURE, and antiword found four pictures, labelling them all [pic] 
in the text version, and in the postscript version [pic] for the website 
reference, and three embedded jpegs (small). I wrote the author asking if 
the URLs could be extracted instead of summarized as [pic].

I will go read about JFIF format.  I don't follow why one format of jpeg 
gets converted to another larger one instead of the same size.

> this is the only guess i have as to why gmails images were larger...
As good as any.  Gmail is not designed for slow connections either.
It takes 30 sec to reach the starting page with lynx (45 with Opera and 
images turned off).  They don't care if it takes 10 times as long to 
download the oversized images.

I will stick with antiword in postscript mode (and maybe ps2pdf at sdf to 
download a smaller pdf file).  The online conversion site never did send 
me a file.

> On 03/03/07, sindi keesan <keesan AT sdf.lonestar.org> wrote:
> > (Sorry, I deleted other emails in this thread).
> >
> > A 131K .doc file containing four links to jpegs, which abiword/wvware and
> > catdoc displayed as two links to websites, and gmail turned into four
> > jpegs (two of them said to be at an external website, two internal) just
> > produced, using antiword -p letter file.doc > file.ps, which gs 8.50
> > displays as:
> >
> > [pic]  (not [png] - the text version had four [pic]s)
> > and three images
> >
> > 115K ps file.  I was able to manually extract and download a thumbnail of
> > the missing image.  This was a screwy file.
> >
> > Perhaps gmail enlarged the jpegs somehow?  It produced four of them, each
> > larger than the ps file.
> >
> > keesan AT sdf.lonestar.org
> > SDF Public Access UNIX System - http://sdf.lonestar.org


Thanks again, Sam

Sindi