Rendering GIF images to PDF?

[Ozhan Hassan <oz...@io.mds.rmit.edu.au>]

Hi,

I have been evaluating FOP for the past couple of weeks. Basically, I have
a java wrapper program which calls the FOP libraries, which reads in an
XSLT style sheet and an XML file with data, then produces PDF for each XML
file read in. I have set my program to read in 1000 XML files and produce
1000 PDFs. The sole purpose of this is to get some performance timings on
different operating systems/machines. 

One of the tests I ran consisted of producing PDFs which where 4 pages
long, that contained a large table, somet text formatting, some SVG and
two GIF images. Comparing this test on the Windows 2000 environment to the
Windows XP environment came as a shock. The test on Windows 2000 completed
in around 7 minutes, whereas on Windows XP it was closer to 20 minutes. 

The Windows 2000 machine has a P4 1.8Ghz CPU, 256mb RAM. The Windows XP
machine much more powerful, a P4 3 Ghz, 1Gb RAM. This is why these results
were disturbing.

Does anyone know why GIFs take so long to render under Windows XP? My
guess is, as GIF is patented, Windows 2000 seems to easily convert the GIF
into another format prior to rendering (maybe using a windows tool).
However, in XP, this tool may no longer be present, hence the process
maybe follows another path which seems to be more expensive? I don't know,
this is just a guess. Also note that under XP, the CPU usage while running
this hovers around the 20% mark.

I tried converting the GIFs to JPGs and the test completed in 4 minutes
under XP (CPU usage was close to 100%), so I am certain the problem lies
with GIFs alone. Could anyone please help me out here with some insight?

Regards,
Ozhan



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