convert: "-quality" ignored in JPG to PDF conversion

[Michael Opdenacker]

Binary package hint: imagemagick

I used to convert a series of JPG files to PDF with the following command:
convert -quality 20 *.jpg output.pdf

With 16 images sizing approximately 3 MB, the output file was about 3MB big in Ubuntu 8.10 and earlier.

This no longer works in 9.04. The output file is now more than 300MB big!

I'm using imagemagick 7:6.4.5.4.dfsg1-1ubuntu3.1

This must be a problem with this particular ImageMagick version, or with the way the package was compiled. I rebuilt ImageMagick-6.5.4-2 from its sources, and it didn't show this issue.

[Kevin Ford (kford)]

I can attest that the output PDF seems unusually, and unnecessarily, large.

I converted 3 JPG files, ranging in size from 200k to 400k, to a PDF with

convert *.jpg out.pdf

The resulting PDF file is 10 MBs.

I'm running Kubuntu 9.04. Imagemagick info:

convert -version
Version: ImageMagick 6.4.5 2009-06-04 Q16 OpenMP http://www.imagemagick.org
Copyright: Copyright (C) 1999-2008 ImageMagick Studio LLC

This may, or may not, be apples and oranges, but FWIW, I downloaded the most recent version of Imagemagick on Windows and, using the same 3 input JPG files, created a PDF. The resulting PDF was 1 MB. The Windows box was what I had handy.

[kaefert (kaefert)]

this bug really sucks..
any solution?

[Martin Gernhard (gecko15x)]

I can confirm this behaviour, although this does not seem to depend on either the "-quality" option or multiple input files. A ~100KiB JPEG is converted into a 1.2MiB PDF with simply "convert image.jpg image.pdf"

convert --version
Version: ImageMagick 6.4.5 2009-06-04 Q16 OpenMP http://www.imagemagick.org
Copyright: Copyright (C) 1999-2008 ImageMagick Studio LLC

[broucaries (roucaries-bastien+bugs)]

Work on debian testing. Could you retest?

[Michael Opdenacker (michael-opdenacker)]

Works on Lucid. You can close the bug.
Thanks!

[Michael Opdenacker (michael-opdenacker)]

Don't forget to close this bug. Thanks!

[Fabrice Coutadeur (fabricesp)]

Fix in Debian has been synced since then. Closing as Fix Released.