Re: Use MetaPost to distort images?

[Henning Hraban Ramm via ntg-context <ntg-context@ntg.nl>]

> Am 05.09.2021 um 10:10 schrieb Hans Hagen <j.hagen@xs4all.nl>:
> 
> On 9/5/2021 9:40 AM, Henning Hraban Ramm via ntg-context wrote:
>>> Am 04.09.2021 um 19:06 schrieb Hans Hagen <j.hagen@xs4all.nl>:
>>> 
>>> On 9/4/2021 2:18 PM, Henning Hraban Ramm via ntg-context wrote:
>>> 
>>>> I guess it’s on me to write a wiki page about GM.
>>> 
>>> you can then also add some comparison with im (i.e. what does it offer more than gm)
>> Oh no...
>> IM and GM have a history, and I don’t want to get involved.
>> GM accuses IM of security issues, feature and dependency bloat, bad code quality, inefficiency, frequent API changes, license changes and whatnot.
> 
> ah, i think i remember ... i switched to gm just because im didn't run well at that time on windows
> 
> personally i think that "accuses of .." show that down side of the open source community (which includes the tex community btw) ... it gets even worse when something sells itself for big money and then after a few years spins off again attacking those who paid them ... i suppose that unconstrianed social media also play a role in this (one reason why i'm not really interested in discussions around this in public)

I hear you. Of course there are reasons to be opinionated and to fork some open source projects if they move into a direction that you don’t like. But that doesn’t mean you can’t be polite about it. And the GM maintainers focus too much on their hate for IM’s developer(s) for my taste. Maybe it helps them to stay focused and write better code if they have an enemy...

> (what to think of: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BhTQyeEdnzs)

The video doesn’t run for me, just read the description: I’m sure the problem exists, but it’s maybe exaggerated?

>> Dependencies according to MacPorts:
>> Full Name: GraphicsMagick @1.3.36_1+q8
>> Library Dependencies: libxml2, bzip2, xz, zlib, libpng, tiff, freetype, libiconv, libtool, lcms2, jasper, libjpeg-turbo, webp
> 
> makes me wonder if there is some simple image manipulation lib that just deals with the pixels .. we don't need xml, freetype, libiconv, ...

Maybe use these libs (libpng etc.) directly? I don’t know what they can do.

Is there a Lua lib that parallels Python’s Pillow?
It also has a lot of dependencies to support image formats or add features, but most of them are optional, see https://pillow.readthedocs.io/en/latest/installation.html#building-from-source

>> Full Name: ImageMagick @6.9.11-60_1+x11
>> Library Dependencies: bzip2, djvulibre, xz, jbigkit, libjpeg-turbo, lcms2, libpng, libraw, tiff, webp, zlib, fftw-3, freetype, fontconfig, ghostscript, libiconv, libtool, openjpeg, openexr, expat, libxml2, libheif, pkgconfig, xorg-libX11, xorg-libXext, xorg-libXt
>> Runtime Dependencies: urw-fonts
> 
> hm, that looks bad ... maybe not have a look after all ... i get the impression that many originally small programs get bloated by pulling in one lib that then pulls in more,

Exactly. The criticism by the GM maintainers probably *is* justified.
(When I installed IM, actually all of the dependecies were already installed for other programs.)

> even if nothing of that is used or useful to the task (we sort of had that when luatex used xpdf from which we only need the reading part but we could not really complain about that because it has been so from the start but it triggered quite a bit of updating)

It might make sense for some projects to dive into these libs and pull out and combine the parts that they really need. Even if that’s against the meaning of shared libraries and makes it harder to watch upstream for security fixes...

> keep in mind that we can just call them as programs using os.execute (or the filter module or ...) ... no need to waste time in integration (apart from a fun aspect)

Of course. I never wanted to suggest integrating GM, IM or whatever.

>> It’s probably not wise to run IM in a web server process for security and efficiency reasons, but if I run it only on my own computer there shouldn’t be a problem.
> 
> hm, why not? all it does in the end is "bits in - bits out"

Apparently there were bugs in IM that bite web developers – if you used IM via PHP and allowed users to upload arbitrary images (e.g. avatars), they could exploit buffer overflows or something like that to hack your system. Or at least stall it (DoS attack).

>> BTW, here’s my script:
>> Here are some results:
> 
> Did you try that with the filter module? It would make it more portable

I completely forgot I could do that (and I even know how).

Working on too many building sites at the same time...


Hraban

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