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The first converter came into my mind was Imaging for Windows (also known as Wang Image Viewer in Windows 95).
I never used it before but I believe it could do the job.
After loaded the tiff file successfully (btw, don't use drag-and-drop with Imaging...
it crashes the program...), I immediately selected the Save As command under the File menu. Hoping
that I can choose to save the file in compressed format.
No luck here.
OK. Fine. Do a little exploration on the menu. It turns out that there is indeed a compression
option under the Page/Properties popup. But it is in page level! That means I need to navigate
all 18 pages in the file and select the compression option for each page! I mean, why on earth would
someone want to use different compression methods on different pages in a single tiff file? Even so, couldn't
the program designers provide an option to apply the same compression method to the whole file?
Enough complain. I still need that compressed tiff file. So I do the selection for all 18 pages
(and waited for each page to compress before I can move on to next page).
Since I don't want to overwrite the original tiff file, I then choose the Save As command to
save the compressed tiff file in another name. The hard disk started crunching and busy writing the output
file. I waited a whole minute and the writing is still going on. I fired up the Explorer to check
what was going on. It turns out that Imaging writes the file in a strange and inefficient way. It seems to be
writing a page out to a temp file. Append the next page to that temp file. Copy and overwrite
the output file with that temp file. Then append the next page...... until the whole file
complete.
OK. I can understand that there might be users out there who need different compression methods
within a tiff file. But why does Imaging writes file in this #@$#%$^$@ way?!! Anyway, after
several minutes of hard disk crunching, I finally got my compressed file. Done. Time to have lunch... but wait!
@##%^@$!#$$!!!! Why the files size is still over 60MB??? I selected the LZW compression and
I am expecting more compression than THAT!
I fired up IrfanView to check the output file. It turns out that only the last page was compressed!
I switched back to the Imaging program and check. Only the last page, the page that was displayed before
I hit Save As, is selected with compression. All other pages are now switched back as No Compression.
@#%^#!^!!!!
At this point, I can conclude that this Imaging program sucks and I better off use either ImageMagick
or tiffcp to do the job. While waiting for my poor AMD K6 200 (o/c 225) doing the compression under
FreeBSD, the programmer inside me started to wonder whether the Imaging problem is simply a programming bug in the UI...
So I made a copy of the original uncompressed tiff file. Loaded it into Imaging again. Repeated 18 times
to select the comperssion method for each page. Then I used the Save instead of Save As command
to write the output file. And bingo! The output file is under 2MB and all pages are compressed correctly
The moral here? Use the good old Unix command line programs whenever you can. Anyway, time for lunch.
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