Re: imagemagic in image-mode and image-dired-thumbnail-mode?

[Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org>]

> From: "Stephen J. Turnbull" <stephen@xemacs.org>
> Cc: Lars Magne Ingebrigtsen <larsi@gnus.org>,
>     spinuvit@gmail.com,
>     joakim@verona.se,
>     emacs-devel@gnu.org
> Date: Mon, 15 Jul 2013 13:15:21 +0900
> 
> Eli Zaretskii writes:
> 
>  > How about taking out the ImageMagick code that does the scaling and
>  > rolling it into Emacs?  How hard can that be?
>  > 
>  > Or maybe there's some other library out there that we could use to
>  > roll our own image scaling code.  I don't believe for a moment that
>  > ImageMagick is the only one that is able to pull that.
> 
> Eli, are you proposing to do the work yourself?

You know very well that if I did, I would not be speaking here, but
instead coding and committing.

> If not, ImageMagick (or GraphicsMagick, which has the goal of being
> more stable, dunno if it succeeds) are plausible strategies for
> getting more features for less Emacs code, and probably less work.

I don't disagree with the principle, but the results are evidently not
very satisfactory.

> XEmacs did try the same strategy with ImageMagick and abandoned it
> (too unstable, too many undocumented crashers) -- but that was over
> ten years ago.  Surely ImageMagick has improved over the years.

Evidently, the improvement is not enough, see the rest of this thread.

> The other issues (handling of advanced features like multi-image GIFs
> <spit/>) probably aren't really bugs, but rather simply
> unimplemented.  I have to wonder how important those are....

You didn't mention scaling, which seems to be the trigger for this
thread.