Re: TIFF to PDF

[bob@evilkat.com]

On Sun, Jun 22, 2003 at 08:33:17PM -0500, Harold Crouch wrote:
> 
> 581-MB of TIFF files were processed by my little 350-MHz machine in 
> ten minutes.  96-MB of PDF files popped out the back end.  Space
> consumed by PDFs is only 16.5% of the space consumed by the TIFFs. 
> 
> Regarding the script: I see "the big picture" but I'm not yet able to
> appreciate the nuances.  I'll get there eventually. :-)
> 
> I "discovered" Champaign yesterday.  I "discovered" Borders Book Store
> in Champaign yesterday.  I found both "Learning Perl" and "Mastering
> Regular Expressions" on the shelves and brought both home with me. 
> You guys are correct; "Learning Perl" is by far the easier read.
> 
> But Steve's script wasn't a perl script, was it?  I thought that it
> was just a straight shell script.  I'm not sure exactly what SED and
> AWK do, and I'm not sure if the functionality of those two...
> applications(?)... is or is not found in perl.  I'm still stumbling a
> little bit through the world of unix.
>

steve's script was a good example of what you can do with the shell and a 
couple of small text utilities (unix/linux is primarily just a collection
of common utilities wrapped around a kernel).  Despite popular oppinion to
the contrary Sed and Awk are your friends and can do a bunch of really cool
things when used right.  Perl is a high level programming language thats often
refered to as the swiss army chainsaw because it can do almost anything. The
key difference to deciding on using the shell or using perl seems to be more
about what type of person you are, people who are comfortable with programming
can do amazing things in perl with tremendous effeciency.  If you aren't a 
programmer and have trouble wrapping your head around a full programming 
language there are a dozen gnu utilities that can probably solve your problem
when glued together with a little shell.  Welcome to Unix/Linux where the
freedom to choose how you would like to solve a problem is yours.


Bob T. Kat
posix kat

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