[lug] deconstructing pdf of voted Boulder ballots

[Bear Giles]

There's something like that with GIS imagery as well. I didn't pursue the
question far but I asked why all of our cells are just 256 pixels square.
It turns out the third-party tools are much more efficient when working
with a large number of small images than a few large images.


On Mon, Dec 12, 2011 at 11:46 PM, Sean Reifschneider <jafo at tummy.com> wrote:

> On 12/09/2011 01:19 PM, Ken Weinert wrote:
> > You might find that the 150 pixel high images is related to the hardware
> > that scans them. Might be related to a buffer size which was optimized
>
> There are all sorts of weirdnesses like that...
>
> In the very distant past I was doing programming for Windows...  Version
> 2.11.  Part of my job was to write some code that would print a page of
> barcode labels.  They had this "banding" API where you would set a band (a
> stripe across the page), then draw the data to that band, and move on to
> the next band.
>
> This was an optimization, they said, to improve performance and prevent
> having to build up a huge raster in memory or something.  I thought that
> sounded like the weirdest thing ever, so my first attempt was drawing the
> whole page.
>
> I started the program, and some huge amount of time later, like 45 minutes,
> it spit out the page.
>
> So my next attempt was to use the banding API, grab the first band and just
> call the function to draw the page.  They said you should draw only the
> portion of the page that fit in the band, but I wanted to see the pretty
> barcodes, so I just looped over the bands, drawing the whole page every
> time.
>
> BAM!  Now the pages printed in 30 seconds instead of 45 minutes.
>
> There is weirdness in document handling.
>
> Sean
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