convert -density 127 -delay 200 foo.pdf foo.gif

[mvkorpel]

I created sharper versions of the example GIFs. The recipe I used is shown in the title, and the software was:

Version: ImageMagick 7.0.7-28 Q16 x64 2018-03-25 http://www.imagemagick.org

[eddelbuettel]

Hm. I would love for these to be crisper, but looking at them side by side both here (ie browser looking at file in your fork and my repo) and after cloning yours makes them ... more identical than different.

Maybe -density 127 is already the default?

[eddelbuettel]

Also, density according to the manual page does take different arguments:

         -density geometry    horizontal and vertical density of the image

which is in fact what I used it for: --density 640x480.

[mvkorpel]

Here is how I see the difference (in "presento"). The image should be examined in full size. The top row is "before" and the bottom is "after". I downloaded the image files from my fork and combined (twice) with +append and -append in convert. Did you look at the right branch?

[eddelbuettel]

That's it. I looked at your master! Silly me. Have Metropolis open and it is night and day.

That makes me really happy. Thanks a big bunch for this.

Now, given that I quoted the (not helpful!!) manual page, how did you learn abou this? Long-time (naive) user of imagemagick here too but I was unaware...

[mvkorpel]

I googled imagemagick rescale text sharp and found a usage example at http://imagemagick.org/discourse-server/viewtopic.php?t=27473

The documentation for the -density option (when following a link from the convert manual) specifies that geometry can be one-dimensional or two-dimensional.

I tried a few different densities and used the results (even one trial would have been enough) to calculate that 127 is the density required for 640x480 raster output, the same size as in the original GIFs. I used a crude stopwatch method (not image metadata) and estimated that the delay between frames in the original images was pretty close to two seconds.

[eddelbuettel]

Excellent. I added docs/Makefile to not forget this, and credited you in ChangeLog and NEWS.

[mvkorpel]

You might also want to edit README.md and remove the comments about losing font crispness.

[eddelbuettel]

Yes, absolutely, that was already in the pipeline and will go out with release 0.0.2.