Re: merging imread and imwrite

[John W. Eaton]

On 30-Jan-2008, I wrote:

| Would using the GraphicsMagick++ library be a good choice?  Will that
| cause trouble for Windows or OS X?  My goal is to simplify the
| imread/imwrite functions.  Ideally, it seems that those functions
| should be very simple, and we wouldn't need to have special cases for
| the actual reading or writing various image types, though we would
| need some logic to properly convert given image types/bitdepths to the
| right data type for compatibility with Matlab's imread function.
| Perhaps almost all of that could be handled in a .m file.

It seems that the __magick_read__ function in Octave Forge does what I
was expecting (and more).  Since ImageMagick can read jpeg and png
files, why do we have separate functions for reading and writing these
formats?  Is it just so that we can read them if ImageMagick is not
availble?  If so, then I think we should just drop them and require
ImageMagick in order to read/write image files.

Also, it might be useful to make some of the other ImageMagick
funtions available in Octave.

jwe