I’ve resumed working on unpaper since I have been using it more than a couple of times lately and there has been a few things that I wanted to fix.
What I’ve been working on now is a way to read input files in more formats; I was really aggravated by the fact that unpaper implemented its own loading of a single set of file formats (the PPM “rawbits”); I went on to look into libraries that abstract access to image formats, but I couldn’t find one that would work for me. At the end I settled for libav even though it’s not exactly known for being an image processing library.
My reasons to choose libav was mostly found in the fact that, while it does not support all the formats I’d like to have supported in unpaper (PS and PDF come to mind), it does support the formats that it supports now (PNM and company), and I know the developers well enough that I can get bugs and features fixed or implemented as needed.
I have now a branch can read files by using libav. It’s a very naïve implementation of it though: it reads the image into an AVFrame structure and then convert that into unpaper’s own image structure. It does not even free up the AVFrame, mostly because I’d actually like to be able to use AVFrame instead of unpaper’s structure. Not only to avoid copying memory when it’s not required (libav has functions to do shallow-copy of frames and mark them as readable when needed), but also because the frames themselves already contain all the needed information. Furthermore, libav 12 is likely going to include libavscale (or so Luca promised!) so that the on-load conversion can also be offloaded to the library.
Even with the naïve implementation that I implemented in half an afternoon, unpaper not only supports the same input file as before, but also PNG (24-bit non-alpha colour files are loaded the same way as PPM, 1-bit black and white is inverted compared to PBM, while 8-bit grayscale is actually 16-bit with half of it defining the alpha channel) and very limited TIFF support (1-bit is the same as PNG; 8-bit is paletted so I have not implemented it yet, and as for colour, I found out that libav does not currently support JPEG-compressed TIFF – I’ll work on that if I can – but otherwise it is supported as it’s simply 24bpp RGB).
What also needs to be done is to write out the file using libav too. While I don’t plan to allow writing files in any random format with unpaper, I wouldn’t mind being able to output through libav. Right now the way this is implemented, the code does explicit conversion back or forth between black/white, grayscale and colour at save time, and this is nothing different than the same conversion that happens at load time, and should rather be part of libavscale when that exists.
Anyway, if you feel like helping with this project, the code is on GitHub and I’ll try to keep it updated soon.
