Book People Archive

Re: Page images of books (was: New to the list.)

Polly Stratton wrote:
> You have really taken on a project!  One suggestion, for putting
> black and white or grayscale on the web you should use gif format.

I have successfully used the tif2gif program for Project Runeberg's
electronic facsimile editions.  I simply scan TIFF images in 600 dpi
and this program scales and converts an image to a 150 dpi grayscale
GIF (which can be displayed by web browsers) on demand through a CGI
script.  The script first looks in a cache directory and retrieves the
already converted GIF image from there, or starts a conversion that
lands a copy in the cache directory.  This is very convenient and
resource efficient.

The tif2gif program is free and has open source code in C, using
libtiff.  It was written for the University of Michigan's "Making of
America" project and I think it can still be found somewhere on their
website.  It can handle black-and-white TIFF G4 images and reduces
them to integral fractions (1:3, 1:4, 1:5 or 1:6).  The MoA site uses
this for "zooming" in and out of a facsimile image.  To keep my user
interface simpler, I just used a fixed scale for each image.


Lars Aronsson,
coordinator.
-- 
  PROJECT RUNEBERG - Nordic literature, art on the Internet since 1992
  mailto:runeberg@[redacted]   http://www.lysator.liu.se/runeberg/