[Image-SIG] Read EPS (bitmap and vector), TIFF and PSD on windows

[Stefano Masini]

Hi,

I've been digging around a bit and found a little too many different
libraries for dealing with image formats, so I'm a little confused...
here's my problem:

I need to read JPG (easy), TIFF (easy), EPS (both bitmap and vector)
and PSD (photoshop) files, and create small jpeg previews. This should
preferrably be done under windows, optionally under linux.

I know this must be not an easy problem to solve in its generality.
Just to mention one problem for all, a vector EPS files may contain
text set with a font that is only present on a given system. So in
order to create a jpeg preview I must rasterize the postscript on the
system containing that font, and my system must be able to use
whatever format the font is available on such platform.

My requirements are not totally stringent though:

1) I can give up PSD files, if I must.
2) I can give up windows platform, if I must.

I already have an ultimate solution: have a windows machine running at
all time, with Photoshop installed and running at all time as well. A
server listening on a tcp port waits for preview-generation requests,
and have Photoshop convert whatever format comes in to a jpeg preview,
that gets sent back to the client machine.

I think this solution is quite extreme though. And probably not very
efficient too.

There may even be some off the shelf command line tool that does all
the magic, I thought. In that case I could write some wrapper in order
to have its functionality available with a simple api. But I don't
know such tool.

So I'm wondering: what else can I do? Do I really have to write such a
monster of a distributed app to obtain simple image previews?

thanks in advance!
stefano