Version 4.6.0 of tiff has moved the tools tiff2pdf and tiff2ps to the "unsupported" subdirectory, no longer builds them by default, and recommends not packaging them by default. Both tools were built and installed by default in earlier versions of tiff. Could a USE flag be added to the ebuild which sets "--enable-tools-unsupported" in the configure step to optionally build tiff2pdf and tiff2ps? I urgently need these two tools and found no equivalent substitute for them.
Have you tried if `convert image.tiff output.ps` (or .pdf) does what you want? Would need USE="tiff postscript" to be enabled on media-gfx/imagemagick. Afaik most(all?) of these tools are redundant with what imagemagick or graphicsmagick can do and there should be little reason to support unsupported tools that could have security issues or be removed entirely anytime, not that I've had a close look.
Yes, I've tried imagemagick convert. But it is by far inferior: * With zip compression, convert produces PDF files whose file size is several times larger than the tiff2pdf output. This is a showstopper here. And there is no option to tune Zip compression. * For multi-page batch scans, tiff2pdf is faster by orders of magnitude. Example: 8 page high-res monochrome text tiff: 0.064 sec versus 1.713 sec, 537486 versus 1444042 bytes pdf file size. * The most common options are much easier and shorter for tiff2pdf than for convert. Examples: - Compression: "-z" versus "-compress Zip" - Set paper size and scale the image to fill it: "-p A4 -F" in tiff2pdf, "-repage a4" plus some more obscure options in convert. * tiff2pdf has options to set the author, title, keywords, date etc. in the pdf. There are no such options in imagemagick convert. imagemagick convert is excellent for some very special corner cases, but for 99 % of the daily pdf conversions, tiff2pdf does a much better job (= more compact output & faster) and is much easier to use. In fact, even for the special cases, I first use convert to preprocess the tiff (generating a more suitable tiff) and then use tiff2pdf (not convert) to generate the pdf from the preprocessed tiff.
I can add a flag to restore them, but upstream are very clear that they're planning on yanking these entirely. They're fed up of getting CVEs for them. So this is going to be a temporary hack, not a fix at all. I'd strongly recommend you file bugs with IM/GM to request whatever features you need from them.
The bug has been referenced in the following commit(s): https://gitweb.gentoo.org/repo/gentoo.git/commit/?id=4fb424072d242bac2604349cbe8a244d4b6c9cb8 commit 4fb424072d242bac2604349cbe8a244d4b6c9cb8 Author: Sam James <sam@gentoo.org> AuthorDate: 2023-10-30 11:28:06 +0000 Commit: Sam James <sam@gentoo.org> CommitDate: 2023-10-30 11:28:41 +0000 net-misc/hylafaxplus: depend on <tiff-4.6 for removed tools See https://sourceforge.net/p/hylafax/mailman/message/38259441/. Bug: https://bugs.gentoo.org/914232 Closes: https://bugs.gentoo.org/914566 Signed-off-by: Sam James <sam@gentoo.org> .../{hylafaxplus-7.0.6-r3.ebuild => hylafaxplus-7.0.6-r4.ebuild} | 3 ++- 1 file changed, 2 insertions(+), 1 deletion(-)
FYI, it's possible to use exiftool to set the metadata after creating the file with convert. exiftool -Title="<title>" -Creator="<creator>" file.pdf
The tools are back! commit 7b20f1ec449f92aa386eb11924ff6e20e7ac97f4 Author: Sam James <sam@gentoo.org> Date: Sun Sep 22 10:57:52 2024 +0100 media-libs/tiff: add 4.7.0 Signed-off-by: Sam James <sam@gentoo.org>
