[lug] image to pdf?

[Michael J. Hammel]

Thus spoke D. Stimits
> I tried saving in gimp as postscript, but the results were ugly (no text
> involved). I'm going to reboot and see if I can find other formats to
> save as, then come back here and find out if others are better at
> conversion (I know jpeg has lossy compression, so it is basically out as
> a good storage format unless I can turn off compression). It does seem
> logical though that somebody somewhere would create a gimp plugin for
> pdf output...though I suppose licensing issues could get in the way.

Not really.  GIMP is a raster tool and PS and PDF mostly wrap raster
graphics inside page formatting, so the switch between PS and PDF wouldn't
be that important to many developers (ie not worth the effort).  GIMP
doesn't save text as text - it converts the text to raster information for
all image formats except XCF.  The XCF format can save text information for
all layers.  There are, however, no conversion tools between XCF and PDF
(and most others, for that matter), so you still need to use GIMP to save as
some standard raster format and then wrap it inside PS.

For what it's worth:

The reason you can't save layer information from XCF into PS is that the
layers can be combined in various ways and text layers can be modified after
the text has been created in ways that can't be reproduced with the text
layer information.  So there isn't any way to guarantee that the text layer
information can be safely pulled from the XCF format and then reinserted
properly when rendering using PS and/or PDF.

-- 
Michael J. Hammel           |
The Graphics Muse           |   I've found Jesus. He was behind the sofa the
mjhammel at graphics-muse.org  |   whole time.
http://www.graphics-muse.com