PCD2HTML

This is a collection of scripts and Makefiles to convert Kodak Photo CD data into documented HTML pages. The user has to ship several files called "rules" to control in which way the images should be converted into JPG files. By supporting certain text files each single image could be documented in English or German (or with slight changes to any other language). The file README.pcd2html gives an introduction how to handle the system.

For those clever people who'd never read any documentation there are some complete sets of example files to convert a set of Photo-CDs. The unchanged result of this set of files give you an impression how good or bad it works.

Motivation of pcd2html

There are many reasons for offering Photo-CD images in WWW browser readable form. Converting the images into JPG images is the first step of this work. There are three possibilities to do that:

convert blindly with a dumb batch file
--> This will end in poor quality and is absolutely not recommended.
load PCD image into an image manipulation program, do some enhancements (as cropping, shrinking, normalizing histogram) and save it as JPG
--> The quality of the output will be OK but it is a time consuming process and (that's the point) do you really know what you have done with your image?? Imagine you want to do a step in between the steps you have done and try to remember what you have done some days/months ago.
use a batch method which is configurable for each image
--> You will need some iterations to get the wanted result but you have always the chance to reproduce what you have done. Most basic stuff of image manipulation can be done by convert. May be it consumes some time to run the batch for an image over and over until you are satisfied. But why not writing the describing text of actual image this time?

Requirements

Operating system:

pcd2html was developed under Debian GNU/Linux version 2.1 (slink). There is a Debian package of it (see below).
It should work under any modern Linux system.
It should work under any modern UNIX system. Problems could appear when trying to mount the CD-ROM drive automatically, but this is no real problem.
In principle pcd2html might work under any operating system which runs the tools listed below. You have to patch PATH names. I accept and include patches for other systems but without any warranty.

The scripts run under a operating system with following programs installed:

ImageMagick: Which version of convert you use depends from your needs to convert the image. I used ImageMagick since 4.0.4 (98/04/01). Please note that some versions between 6.0 and 6.2 have problems converting the highest resolution of a pcd image. Moreover the command line syntax has changed. Thus you need ImageMagick version 6.0 or higher since pcd2html 0.4.
bash: I used GNU bash, version 2.01.1(1)-release
Some special bash features where used, I'm not sure if other shells could be used. Lower bash versions should work, too.
GNU make: I used GNU Make version 3.76.1
There are features in GNU make which aren't available in other make varieties. I expect no other make to work with pcd2html. Lower versions could work, too.
grep: I used grep (GNU grep) 2.1
No very specific features of GNU grep are used. Every grep should work.
sed: I used GNU sed version 2.05
The sed programming in pcd2html is not so tricky, that it is expected to work with oder sed versions, too.

I really hope that pcd2html is useful for you and look forward any critics, bugfixes or enhancements.

Get pcd2html source package from Debian mirror

Questions to Andreas Tille

Homepage of Andreas Tille
Other Debian packages of Andreas Tille