Reading PDF documents

[Bernard Devlin]

I just downloaded one of the binaries from the IM download site (the
zip file that is meant to require no installation/windows registry
atlerations).  No compilation was involved.  No error messages were
thrown up in the installation (i.e. unzipping process).  I found what
I took to be the GUI interface to IM, and fired it up.  No errors.

The zip file was indeed 43mb, which expanded  out to 109mb.  I looked
at the files included in the zip archive, and saw one called
"convert.exe".  I could not imagine that Mark intends for customers to
go through a full "end user GUI" install. So, as a test, I copied
convert.exe into a temp directory and ran it from a command prompt.
It complained about needing a dll, so I copied that over.  Then it ran
without complaining, and explained what the command line options were.
 That is the kind of environment in which one would use shell to get
an external program to do some work.

The combined size of exe + dll combination was about 7mb.  Considering
that the Skype client weighs in at 23mb, Chrome is 44mb, and iWorks is
a 474mb download, I think we really need to move beyond a fixation on
the size of an application being downloaded.  I don't use Skype more
than once a month.  I downloaded half a gigabyte from Apple just have
a look at Keynote.  Clearly having a large initial download does not
stop most businesses from thriving (or Apple would have ditched iWorks
long ago).  I imagine Graham's clients would be happy to download an
application that was 20mb bigger if it could do what they want it to
do.  A LiveCode + IM exe/dll + Ghostscript exe/dll might still be
smaller than the Skype client.  My home DSL line has a (soft) limit of
20gb a month - many of the customers exceed that considerably and on a
regular basis.  We are not in the days of dialup modems.  Almost the
whole of the web is predicated on people being prepared to download
massive files (a friend of mine was recently reduced to using a dialup
modem for a week, and she couldn't even moderate the comments on her
blog that way).

My experiment was on a "Vista Home" laptop.  It didn't strike me as a
particularly difficult nor onerous task to do this test.  And I have
no interest in nor experience with ImageMagick.

I surmised this is the kind of scenario that Mark was working with.

Bernard

On Sun, Oct 2, 2011 at 3:51 AM, Chipp Walters <chipp at chipp.com> wrote:
> FYI, the ImageMagick DL is over 43 Mb, and the GhostScript install is
> another 12 each for 64-bit and 32-bit. Plus there's the necessity of
> detecting which Windows OS you're on vs which to install. Creating an
> installer which can correctly install all of this is not trivial, and it
> will create a final installation substantially larger in filesize than the
> LC application-- and difficult for many to download. And then there's this
> bit of information regarding AFTER installing the compiled binary:
>
> "If you have any problems, install the Visual C++ 2010 Redistributable
> Package (x86) or Visual C++ 2010 Redistributable Package (x64). 64-bit
> Windows requires both packages (x86 & x64)."