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

[Stephen J. Turnbull]

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?  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.  (There were some other
candidates such as imlib, but I haven't followed graphics libraries
for over ten years.)

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.  Note
also that the decision to abandon was made by the guy who implemented
in the first place.

If the current Lisp protection from the PDF crashes isn't good enough,
add a filter at the C level so Lisp *can't* pass PDFs to ImageMagick
(or tell the ImageMagick advocates it will be removed or deprecated if
they don't, which IMO is a reasonable condition, although I probably
wouldn't require it myself).

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....