[Image-SIG] seeking guidance on image conversion

[Brad Allen]

Hello,

I am new to this list, having gotten involved in a project at work 
that uses PIL. I am looking for guidance in a few areas, hoping to 
find a better way than our methods for manipulating images.

We have a workflow which involves converting various file formats to 
TIFF, and allowing them to be viewed and manipulated in a wxPython 
app.

Currently we are calling on some external binaries to perform these 
conversions on a Linux server, and in some cases the Windows desktop 
clients have to do some conversions as well. It would be nice if 
there were some more Python native approaches available.

The goal is to get everything into a compressed TIFF format. 
Currently we do that for Word documents and PDF documents. We also 
need to convert between multipage TIFF and single page TIFF. Here is 
a list of the image conversions we are performing:

* One of the Python scripts is calling Linux tiffsplit command to 
convert multipage faxes (TIFF group 4 compressed) into collections of 
single page TIFFs.

* The wxPython app is calling GnuWin32's tiffcp.exe to rejoin single 
page TIFFs into multipage TIFFs.

* We're calling the ImageMagick convert command to make PDFs into TIFFs.

* We're calling an Open Office 1.1.5 command line tool to convert 
Word documents to PDF (which then get converted to TIFF by 
ImageMagick).

In some of these cases there may be C libraries we could wrap, but if 
someone has already done that work or if there is a better approach I 
would be grateful to hear about it.

Thanks!