Simple application to print part of an image - suggestions?

[Chris G]

On Wed, Mar 04, 2009 at 01:46:47PM -0800, Patton Echols wrote:
> On 03/04/2009 02:34 AM, Chris G wrote:
> > On Tue, Mar 03, 2009 at 08:00:08PM -0800, Patton Echols wrote:
> >   
> >> On 03/03/2009 07:22 PM, Matthew Flaschen wrote:
> >>     
> >>> Which ImageMagick's display command can do easily.  I just gave the full
> >>> steps in another email.
> >>>   
> >>>       
> >> Oops, my bad.  And here I sent another reply.  I wish I had seen this 
> >> and your other post for mouthing off  . . . Again!
> >>
> >> As you'll see in my other reply, I was aware of display, but did not 
> >> realize it would do all of that.  I had looked at the man page, but 
> >> understood the options to be command line, not what could be done while 
> >> looking at an image.  Very interesting. 
> >>
> >> Thanks for the pointer
> >>
> >>     
> > ... but, as I said, it doesn't do what I want.  I can very easily
> > select the part of the image I want and have it displayed in the
> > ImageMagick window but I can't then get it to fill and A4 sheet when
> > printed. 
> >
> > ImageMagick's display utility is almost exactly what I want except for
> > the printing bit.
> >   
> In theory the following should work, but see my problem below.
> 
> When using the display utility, as Matt described, before you print, 
> click on View | Resize  The dialog will show the existing geometry eg 
> 640x480,0,0  Replace this with the number if pixels needed to fill the 
> narrowest width of your page.  For example, if your printer is looking 
> for 300 dpi and you have 8inch X 10.5 inch printable area, the narrow 
> direction is 2400 dpi so you would use 2400x2400.  The "Constrain Ratio" 
> checkbox is ticked  by default so your resized image will be some 
> different size with a max of 2400
> 
> Then do the File | Print sequence.
> 
> I tried testing this and it works to a point.  A small crop expands a 
> larger box  size, but not full width.   My printer is a HP 950c using 
> and my box uses CUPS to print to it.  The IM display command prints to a 
> postscript printer.  I'm not sure what is going on with my setup and I 
> don't have time to dig into it. (Nor do I have any idea where I would look!)
> 
It sort of works (as you say) but it is a bit clumsy, especially as
resizing to 2400x<something> results in a image which is several times
the size of my screen.

Not to mention I don't really see how I know what dpi "your printer is
looking for", my printer's ultimate dpi is something like 1200x1200 I
think.


Strangely using a different application to print the image that
ImageMagick has cropped gets me the result I want!

So all I need do is crop the image to the bit I want with ImageMagick
and then just open the image with another application (showPhoto was
available so I used that, Firefox works OK too) and print it.

It's not perfect but it's good enough, and I didn't need to install
anything extra.

-- 
Chris Green