Far from being fluffy or friendly, Pillow silently allows installation
of itself without support for major image types. Reportlab calls for
pillow 2.4.0. On Ubuntu 14.04 LTS this will trigger an upgrade of
pillow that will be built without JPEG or ZLIB so it is effectively
neutered, and unfortunately Pillow will not detect this situation at
install time and guide users to a resolution. Instead, you see nasty
stack traces.
So add a run-time check to ensure that Pillow is sane and capable of JPEG
and PNG support since both may be used internally.
Drop two dependencies and replace them with one that does the job of
both. Smells like progress.
mupdf does PDF file repair and rendering
poppler does rendering and page splitting
qpdf does PDF file repair and page splitting
ghostscript does PDF file repair, rendering, and page splitting (sort of)
So we use qpdf. Ghostscript's page splitting is supposed is less
efficient because it reprints the page (PDF -> Postscript -> PDF) and
possibly loses quality. qpdf's library could be used to improve
performance.
This causes a slight performance regression:
py.test tests/test_main.py::test_maximum_options went from 187 seconds
up to 192. This is likely due to O(n) serialized invocations of qpdf
compared to a single serialized call to pdfseparate. Could improve on
this situation by using the example code in qpdf: pdf-split-pages.cc
or create marker files in split_pages() and then write a new @transform
function that would split pages on each CPU. Probably not worth it,
overall, unless this causes problems on files with hundreds of pages.
James R. Barlow