Slashdot Mirror

"The exploit is trivial, so we expect it to be available within hours of this post," Huber wrote in a blog post.

Wouldn't it be prudent to get the maintainers for the library to patch first before making it exploit available to the public?

The public disclosure, with a mitigation procedure, was released on 3 May. It is now 6 May. How many exploits have there been during these hours? Why isn't the sky burning?

That looks like an ImageMagick tool.

Is that installed on Fedora by default? I'm too lazy to check.

Is a JPEG at 0% compression a RAW image?

It would be close but not exact. The way you would get close is to set the 8x8 quantization matrix to all 1's. In JPEG compression, the image is divided into 8x8 blocks, discrete cosine transformed, elementwise divided by an 8x8 quantization matrix, rounded to the nearest integer, and then (usually) Huffman encoded. The primary problem with being perfectly lossless is that the DCT produces a fractional result. So even if you set the quantization matrix to all 1's, the rounding step would lose information.

Care to enlighten me as to how one sets jpeg compression to 0%?

It's not easy to do in most image editors; even the highest (12) quality setting in Photoshop has quantization. You can do it in ImageMagick, however.

Also, no, RAW formats are not simply uncompressed, but largely unprocessed data as well (certainly less processed than what you get from an out of camera tif or jpf.)

Raw formats are indeed compressed; they're just losslessly compressed.

Finally, there is a true lossless JPEG format, though it is distinct from the usual JPEGs.

What you really need is something that sorts on exif fields, and also generates a normalized histogram xsum for the image itself.

More intensive, but not too bad these days. Imagemagick combined with exiftool, xargs, sort and sed should get you what you want.

OP is just discovering the command line and finding out, that you can actually do almost anything with it.Don't bash his learning process (pun intended).

Take a webcam picture:
streamer -f jpeg -o image.jpg

Do magic with that picture:
convert image.jpg -colorspace Gray image_gray.jpg

And do check out rest of the ImageMagick:
http://www.imagemagick.org/

Why not put a live example online where people and computers can try this. And just a little test. These are the possible answer:
1. lady with pink bowtie and purple mustache
2. ugly narrow eyed person puckering up for a kiss
3. bees on top fling towards each other, big U in the middle
4. robot on a skateboard like thing
5. square faced guy with big nose and short yellow hair fuzz
6. hulk guy with tiny boxing gloves through the waist
7. The letter H
8. lipstick on a lady who takes steroids
9. linebacker with mustache and yellow nose
10.little birdies facing eachother on the bottom and little bees flying away from eachother on top

Now which one is http://houghi.org/Fun/blob.png ?
Please first look at the images on the original site and then look at this one. Do not go back to the original site. Extra points if you put some time in between the 'learning' and the 'verification'. Say an hour, a day, ....

Now use a computer and use `identify -verbose http://houghi.org/Fun/blob.png |grep signature` and do that with the originals.
I am sure many people will be able to figure out a program that can link the images.

So to me it looks as if there is a serious difference between the images when you are a computer. And this is only one parameter that shows a difference. There is creation date and what not.

So instead of some blobs, they could have use images of things that people can see. e.g. "a linebacker with mustache and yellow nose". The computer does not care what the image says.

Or they could try to be clever and make at least the identify part identical. Then we would have something to talk about.

For now the images make it more difficult for humans, not for computers. (Or did they think to trow off their Windows machines by saving png images as jpg?)

I have to disagree with this. GUIs are not the end-all-be-all of computing by any means, but they have their uses. I would be loathe to edit graphics using a CLI, for example, other than the most routine rotation, scaling, etc.

Fine and dandy if you're operating on a workstation, if you're doing this on a server (which is the focus of this conversation) you're doing it wrong. Command line graphic manipulation is mature and powerful, although not nearly as intuitive as using a GUI. It's worth it in the long run if you're offering services to users that depend on re-sizing photos, watermarking, and related asset generation rather than depending on someone for photoshop macros. Unless you want to argue that Facebook employs an army of photoshop monkeys with stellar performance...

I'm a scientist. I write papers that are published in academic journals and I review such papers for journals. Journals use editorial managers to, well, manage, the entire process and you'd be surprised how often those send out automated e-mails that, helpfully, contain my login and password IN PLAINTEXT, just in case I might have forgotten (even if I did not request the password). ...

Imagemagick.org does this in their monthly email, sent as a "Heartbeat" reminder.

From: mailman-owner mailman-owner@imagemagick.org

This is a reminder, sent out once a month, about your imagemagick.org mailing list memberships. It includes your subscription info and how to use it to change it or unsubscribe from a list. You can visit the URLs to change your membership status or configuration, including unsubscribing, setting digest-style delivery or disabling delivery altogether (e.g., for a vacation), and so on.

In addition to the URL interfaces, you can also use email to make such changes. For more info, send a message to the '-request' address of the list (for example, mailman-request@imagemagick.org) containing just the word 'help' in the message body, and an email message will be sent to you with instructions. If you have questions, problems, comments, etc, send them to mailman-owner@imagemagick.org. Thanks!

Passwords for (plaintext username)
List Password // URL
magick-announce@imagemagick.org (plaintext password)
http://studio.imagemagick.org/mailman/options/magick-announce/ (plaintext username)
magick-users@imagemagick.org (plaintext password)
http://studio.imagemagick.org/mailman/options/magick-users/ (plaintext username)

There are two other web sites that I deal with that use this automated listserv process in exactly the same way.

I'm a scientist. I write papers that are published in academic journals and I review such papers for journals. Journals use editorial managers to, well, manage, the entire process and you'd be surprised how often those send out automated e-mails that, helpfully, contain my login and password IN PLAINTEXT, just in case I might have forgotten (even if I did not request the password). ...

Imagemagick.org does this in their monthly email, sent as a "Heartbeat" reminder.

From: mailman-owner mailman-owner@imagemagick.org

This is a reminder, sent out once a month, about your imagemagick.org mailing list memberships. It includes your subscription info and how to use it to change it or unsubscribe from a list. You can visit the URLs to change your membership status or configuration, including unsubscribing, setting digest-style delivery or disabling delivery altogether (e.g., for a vacation), and so on.

In addition to the URL interfaces, you can also use email to make such changes. For more info, send a message to the '-request' address of the list (for example, mailman-request@imagemagick.org) containing just the word 'help' in the message body, and an email message will be sent to you with instructions. If you have questions, problems, comments, etc, send them to mailman-owner@imagemagick.org. Thanks!

Passwords for (plaintext username)
List Password // URL
magick-announce@imagemagick.org (plaintext password)
http://studio.imagemagick.org/mailman/options/magick-announce/ (plaintext username)
magick-users@imagemagick.org (plaintext password)
http://studio.imagemagick.org/mailman/options/magick-users/ (plaintext username)

There are two other web sites that I deal with that use this automated listserv process in exactly the same way.

Try editing a photo with the command line. Sure, you can do it, but why would you?

Seriously? I'd love to leave it a "Because you can." You're not thinking creatively enough or you must not do much programming. You see the results of it around you every day online! How do you think thumbnails are generated on many websites!? Packages such as Image Magick or GD are powerful command line programs. You may not be aware that photo editing software features command line options for situations where batch jobs make sense.

A scenario would be removing EXIF data from photos (like the latitude and longitude embedded by many devices by default, not so hot if you're a clown distributing pictures of their super secret grow op...). Irfanview is a great example of a GUI application exposed with command line functionality. Say you've got a bunch of photos of a client's (frequently rotating) products featured both in print advertisements and their online store.

Another real life example this last week I wrote a script to automate creating various graphic assets for our user created apps on the various platforms we support (iOS, Android variants) with files users uploaded directly to our web server. If you notice most professional software packages support scripting functionality because it's extremely useful (Maya, Cinema 4D, CAD, Photoshop (macros) etc.).

Please don't interpret this as subtle advocacy supporting command line elitism. Simply put I enjoy being productive, I get more done and my clients/employers as well as I benefit immensely from this. Daily there are times where GUIs are the way to go. For example I find editing documents using a mouse much faster for most situations, multiple copy and paste jobs are night and day faster for instance.

Anyone that has used Image Magick could tell you why this example might *not* be a poor one.

Yes, a free, massively powerful CLI image editor.

Pug

"And when's the last time you edited photos, video, or audio with a CLI?"

For images, that's what Imagemagick or netpbm are for, and I use them all the time. I've also used ffmpeg for video, although not as frequently. If I had to use a GUI for the same tasks (hundreds of images), I'd probably give up in frustration. For batch operations there's nothing better than a CLI.

As others have noted there is a place for both CLI and GUI operations. It is disappointing to see how many people think a GUI is the be-all and end-all of computing. I wouldn't want to use a system if a CLI wasn't available in some form as an option because for some tasks it is the best choice. Hmmm.... although if I was forced to use MS-DOS as the only CLI option ("C:\ prompt") I could see people's point. It's truly awful, and I don't touch it on Windows. I install Cygwin. Anyone who has only experienced MS-DOS as their CLI experience doesn't really know what's possible.

CLIs are superior to GUIs in the same way romance novels are superior to sex.

Wrong analogy. It would be more like doing sex (CLI) versus telling someother to do it for you (GUI).

And when's the last time you edited photos, video, or audio with a CLI?

This morging.

Doing photo touchups from the command line would suck ass

I take it you're not familiar with imagemagick?

Who gives a shit? My cheapass "free" workflow for OCR-ing PDF documents on Windows was basically what's described here. With this, all I need is to run a virtual server on my computer! That's significantly better.

I use Irfanview for conversion, resizing, cropping and other basics (yes, even on Linux - sorry but it runs perfect on WINE and does 90% of what I need ...

Not a big fan of Irfanview, but what I can't get over is why the *nix world lacks an image viewer that is as fast as Irfanview is, or as fast as similar programs like ACDSee, etc. Most such programs that ship by default with popular Linux distros are somewhere between embarassing and next to useless.

It's similar to the situation with trying to get Firefox to use an external viewer for graphics (i.e., "No such option" or "Use this add-on and we might give you an option buried in a context menu"). I don't care how nifty, feature-full, or stylised your image gallery home website is, who really wants to use a frigging browser to display anything other than thumbnails?

As for conversion, resizing, cropping, etc., you might want to look into ImageMagick. A bit overkill for most, but for automated tasks, nothing beats it.

imagemagick can also compare two images, and tell you how different they are. That is -- quantify the differences by returning a floating point number or two (PSNR, RMSE) in a way that a more-compressed JPEG image will return a correspondingly different floating point value. I know the question concerns two JPEG-compressed images, but if you do have an original image -- and you want to test which is closest to the original, ImageMagick can do that. Use the ImageMagick compare function.
See http://www.imagemagick.org/script/compare.php

Also, [[www.gimp.org]] is able to look at an image and approximate what JPEG compression quality setting was used, and use that same quality setting to save an output JPEG copy of the image. So -- they have some algorithm inside of their application which takes an image and returns (a good guess of) the corresponding jpeg quality value.
Of course, this does not help you if the image was saved with a lousy JPEG quality value, like 10/100, and later saved at a much higher value, like 98/100. Since the algorithm only sees the last image, it would tell you the quality value is 98/100, even though the contents of the image would indicate the results of 10/100 compression, because of multi-generational lossy compression.

I have yet to encounter any *nix software that came in a .7z file,

Imagemagick has .7z and .lzma tarballs: ftp://ftp.imagemagick.org/pub/ImageMagick/

Also, the small gains from using 7zip just isn't worth "converting",

I would consider 30% smaller files (almost 50% compared to gzip) pretty impressive.

Or try a simple script for imagemagick in Ubuntu, and you can fill a folder full of photos to compress, right click, scripts, photos4email.sh. Now we have a folder full of smaller jpegs for email, right click on the new folder, compress to a zip file, then bobs your uncle, attach that to an email! (bloody macs making things GUI simple!)

Or under windows just use ImageMagick
http://www.imagemagick.org/script/binary-releases.php#windows

You speak of automation, yet you mention GUI elements: I don't understand you, you seem more disturbed by the learning curve to perform tasks, not the automation capacities. Once you have determined parameters, isn't the work left akin to define a macro for it?

In the case automation is important as you mention it, I don't see how Gimp wouldn't be able to fill that spot. Using ImageMagick's convert application is another option:
http://www.imagemagick.org/Usage/

If the point is really that you _don't_ want to learn, there won't ever be a way out of Photoshop for you I guess, unless you are willing to pay someone to do the macro/script writing.

It's called ImageMagick

Am pretty sure ImageMagick will work with 48-bit colourspace in PNG format.
http://www.imagemagick.org/
It's hardly an intuitive program (does a GUI even exist?), but it'll sharpen/unsharpen/blur etc, and employs a much wider variety of resize algorithms.
http://www.imagemagick.org/script/command-line-opt ions.php#filter
http://www.imagemagick.org/Usage/resize/filter_mon tage.jpg

Am pretty sure ImageMagick will work with 48-bit colourspace in PNG format.
http://www.imagemagick.org/
It's hardly an intuitive program (does a GUI even exist?), but it'll sharpen/unsharpen/blur etc, and employs a much wider variety of resize algorithms.
http://www.imagemagick.org/script/command-line-opt ions.php#filter
http://www.imagemagick.org/Usage/resize/filter_mon tage.jpg

Am pretty sure ImageMagick will work with 48-bit colourspace in PNG format.
http://www.imagemagick.org/
It's hardly an intuitive program (does a GUI even exist?), but it'll sharpen/unsharpen/blur etc, and employs a much wider variety of resize algorithms.
http://www.imagemagick.org/script/command-line-opt ions.php#filter
http://www.imagemagick.org/Usage/resize/filter_mon tage.jpg

Agreed! Especially for photographers, serious amateurs and pros. When GIMP offers at least 12 bit colour depth then it may be a good cheap, free, replacement for Photoshop.

If you want to take on photoshop... You have to get serious. Its not that hard to make a better app than photoshop. Painter and Alias Sketchbook pro both feature things that make photoshop seem primative....

Are Painter and Alias really good photo editors, better than PS? I'm hoping to break into photography but as I'm on disability and don't work I can't justify the expense of PS. So I've been considering other programs like Painter, Blender, Xara Xtreme, Inkscape, or ImageMagick. I'm hoping to get a Macbook Pro rsn and when I do I've give them a test drive.

Last time i ran linux.. the whole dependency thing drove me mad and installing things were varied experiences.

Linspire is coming out with ports for different distros of linux for Click N Run or CNR. Installing software with it means there's no dependencies to deal with, CNR takes care of installing software. Once the CNR software is installed the user goes to the CNR software warehouse, choose what software they want, then click the install button. CNR downloads and installs the software, if there are any dependencies it takes care of them. Linux geeks may frown on such things, but they have to realize that if they want the average computer user to use Linux then there has to be an easy way for users to install apps.

Don't be a software pirate, stay legal and properly licensed by using the various free open source GPL licensed programs instead that are also available in Windows versions. Many of the best free GPL licensed open source programs which have been developed for Linux users have also been released in Windows versions. Not everyone is ready yet to move from Windows to a free GPL licensed alternative such as Ubuntu Linux. For them, a first step to freedom would be to keep on using a properly licensed copy of Windows, but to start using the various free GPL licensed alternatives to their various favorite programs. Someday, if they decide to move to a totally free operating system such as Linux they will then be able to use the Linux versions of those same programs. There is now an amazingly large complete alternative free software ecosystem of free GPL licenced software legally available for free to everyone.

Here are just a few examples of free (mostly GPL licensed) programs which are also available in Windows versions:

• OpenOffice the free office suite
• Mozilla Firefox web browser
• Thunderbird email program
• Clamwin free antivirus
• Gimp image mainpulation program for photo retouching and image composition
• ImageMagick software suite to create, edit, and compose bitmap images
• Inkscape open source scalable vector graphics editor
• PuTTY: A Free Telnet/SSH Client
• FTP client and server
• 7-Zip file archiver which can handle compression formats such as 7z, ZIP, GZIP, BZIP2 and TAR
• Scribus open source page layout application
• AbiWord the free word processing program
• Gnumeric the free spreadsheet program
• Stellarium free open source planetarium
• Celestia free space simulation and space exploration program

There is no longer a necessity to use photoshop or other commercial/proprietary programs. I switched to using only Free Software in my webdesign company almost two years ago, and though I spent some weeks in transition learning the new software, I now work a lot more efficiently. This is partly thanks to CLI applications like ImageMagick, but I also find that for most work, the FOSS counterparts of Adobe's applications are much more efficient to use; they are a lot faster, handles larger files, are not cluttered up with un-needed functionality, and are more easily customized. Another advantage of using FOSS is that a lot of proprietary software tends to lead the user towards a more or less predefined goal as to how the final output should look, resulting in, amongst other things, a lot of templatish pages on the web.

My recommended line of design tools are:

GIMP (Who needs Photoshop?)
Krita (For those rare moments when CMYK are required)
Inkscape (For vector graphics and experimenting with layout)
Quanta (For making the actual webpages)
Scribus (For making professional PDF's)

Unfortunately, there are no FOSS applications able to make flash files like Flash does, but my needs have been well served by SWF Tools and OpenOffice.org's ability to export presentations to swf, and I expect to see some great development in this area now that Adobe has opened its action script engine.

I have done document capture using a scanner and a digital camera.

It falls into three main steps:
- 1. Acquire the image via camera or scanner
- 2. Fix image quality
- 3. (optional) OCR the image

I fix the image quality (i.e., reduce colors, fix the spotlight effect of a digital camera's flash, etc) by:

1. Stretch the image's contrast using ImageMagick (similar to automatic level adjustment)

convert.exe input_image_0.png -equalize image_1.png

2. Reduce the number of shades of white. (changes all pixels within 10% of white to be white)

convert.exe image_1.png -white-threshold 90% image_2.png

3. Reduce the number number of shades of black. (changes all pixels within 10% of black to be black)

convert.exe image_2.png -black-threshold 10% image_3.png

4. Adaptive threshold the image. Important that you set the window (WidthxHeight) to be about the height of two lines of text and about 4 characters wide. A smaller window runs faster but can cause noise to be put inbetween two adjacent lines of text.

convert.exe image_3.png -lat 20x20 image_4.png

5. (optional) OCR image_4.png

Other options:
- Threshold by a percentage

--> 50% threshold using
convert x.png -monochrome out.png

--> User definable threshold amount (e.g., 80%) using
convert x.png -threshold 80% out.png

Lastly, you can chain together commands so that the steps can be simply written as one line:

convert input_image_0.png -equalize -white-threshold 90% -black-threshold 10% -lat 20x20 output_image.png

Noise removal can be optionally done before any other image processing
Noise removal methods:
- NL filter for 'edge enhancement' in gimp (Filters -> Enhance -> NL Filter) (Use settings, Edge Enhancement, Alpha(0.60) Radius (1.0)). This is similar to the pnmnlfilt.exe in Netpbm - found at netpbm.sourceforge.net

- Despeckle (not always helpful)
- Dust and scratches in Photoshop
- Smart blur in PhotoShop
- Unsharp mask - It does a good job smoothing background noise but does not do a very good job at edge enhancement (NL Filter does a better job).

ImageMagick is open source and can be had here http://www.imagemagick.org/
Netpbm can be had here http://netpbm.sourceforge.net/

I did this in two projects:

- Scanning a large number of oversized newspapers (10 inches by 12.5 inches) (serveral hundered pages)
- Scanning in 8.5 inch x 11 inch tinted color pages from books (about 500 pages, messy because pages had a color background)

The multiple scan for an oversize page takes too much time because you have to scan the page face down on the scanner.
This requires you to:
1. lift up the paper,
2. flip to the next page,
3. flip over,
4. place on scanner (align it)
5. scan (suggest 300 dpi or higher black and white (monochrome) scan)
6. align page for second scan
7. scan (suggest 300 dpi or higher black and white (monochrome) scan)
8. (later) put both scans into a single image file, or, much more time consuming, join the two scans into a single seamless image

This takes about 1 minute per page given a 10 second per scan scanning time.

A digital camera would take about 10 seconds per page without any post processing, page joining in an image editor, etc.

The main OCR issue with a camera is that you need to approach the quality of 250+ DPI scanner image. You need to take a camera snapshot with a dpi higher than 250 to get near scanner quality because camera will distort the image, add noise, over sharpen, etc. I've had good results taking images that work out to 350 dpi with a digital camera.

For those that are struggling to understand how the author of this article is accomplishing his approach, here is some further information.

The author obviously has a Linux server in his house, that is running DHCPD

To selectively send some clients to some locations, and others to the normal internet, he assigns an IP address on a different network to clients that don't have MAC Addresses that he knows about.

Forwarding on to sites of his choice is done by using IPTables, which is a utility that allows you to configure the packet filtering components of the Linux TCP/IP Stack. In this instance, the Linux box is just functioning as a firewall, and he is selectively sending requests from certain IP addresses to different hosts of his chosing.

Finally, the Up-side-down and blurry-image conversions is accomplished by sending page requests from those before-mentioned IP addresses to a proxy server, which in this case is Squid - and then allowing the proxy server to run a script which calls an ImageMagick command called mogrify which allows you to resize an image, blur, crop, despeckle, dither, draw on, flip, join, re-sample, and much more.

And that folks, is the rest of the story.

For those that are struggling to understand how the author of this article is accomplishing his approach, here is some further information.

The author obviously has a Linux server in his house, that is running DHCPD

To selectively send some clients to some locations, and others to the normal internet, he assigns an IP address on a different network to clients that don't have MAC Addresses that he knows about.

Forwarding on to sites of his choice is done by using IPTables, which is a utility that allows you to configure the packet filtering components of the Linux TCP/IP Stack. In this instance, the Linux box is just functioning as a firewall, and he is selectively sending requests from certain IP addresses to different hosts of his chosing.

Finally, the Up-side-down and blurry-image conversions is accomplished by sending page requests from those before-mentioned IP addresses to a proxy server, which in this case is Squid - and then allowing the proxy server to run a script which calls an ImageMagick command called mogrify which allows you to resize an image, blur, crop, despeckle, dither, draw on, flip, join, re-sample, and much more.

And that folks, is the rest of the story.

Isn't that a bit of overkill for an entity-relationship diagram? Have you considered something like Graphviz?

As for batch processing with GIMP, I'm pretty sure it's supported. If you don't like that, you can always use ImageMagick. If you're complaining that GIMP's batch mode won't execute a script against X number of images, have you considered a tiny shell script? Something like:
FILES=`find . -type f -name "image[0-9][0-9].gif"`; for FILE in $FILES; do ...; done

I'm not sure that can be done, but ImageMagick is a set of command line tools that allow you to do amazing things.

But the frst part could be Edge detection, from there you're on your own...

http://imagemagick.org/ is free, runs on most any platform you'd ever case to use, and implements fuzzy c-means for image segmentation (which basically turns regular photos into "coloring book" versions of themselves). the c-means segmentation may be a bit too coarse for what you want to do. in that case, implementing a mean-shift segmenter (google for comaniciu and meer) will probably do a nice job. hope this helps!

I only counted 6.

Torsmo
http://torsmo.sourceforge.net/

ImageMagick
http://imagemagick.org/

Aterm
http://aterm.sourceforget.net/

Root-tail
http://www.goof.com/pcg/marc/root-tail.html

Quod Libet
http://sacredchao.net/quodlibet

Transmission
http://transmission.m0k.org/

Per info locate on their download page:

"The Windows version of ImageMagick is self-installing. Simply click on the appropriate version below and it will launch itself and ask you a few installation questions. Versions with Q8 in the name are 8 bits-per-pixel component, whereas, Q16 in the filename are 16 bits-per-pixel component. A Q16 version permits you to read or write 16-bit images without losing precision but requires twice as much resources as the Q8 version. Versions with dynamic in the filename include ImageMagick libraries as dynamic link libraries. If you are not sure which version is appropriate, choose ImageMagick-6.2.6-4-Q16-windows-dll.exe."

http://www.imagemagick.org/script/binary-releases. php#windows

The web site does give some help.
Regards,
Anonymous Coward

ImageMagick's function library is also accessible through a variety of APIs for your favorite language -- scripting or otherwise. If you haven't used it, try it . . . it's GPL and it Rawks (with a capital "r"). ;-)

In other words, there are many cases where the "before" and "after" images look almost identical. In the cases of color manipulation, most of those black-and-white images are of little value -- occasionally laughably so.

Haha, that was funny...well if you need to see what it actually does, their examples site has some better images.

How to move hundreds of pics from digicam to the computer, crop and rename?

ImageMagick

Is there any canned code to verify that an image is in WMF format?

The identify utility that is part of ImageMagick can do it.

You want ImageMagick.

Well first of all, most browsers do have an option to set fonts and override other page's fonts if that's really what you want to do.

In IE, it's under Tools / Internet Options / Fonts. To make your chosen fonts override fonts set by Web pages, look under Tools / Internet Options / Accessibility, and there's an option labeled, "Ignore font styles specified on Web pages."

In Firefox, it's under Tools / Options / General / Fonts and Colors. The option to force Firefox to override fonts set by the Web is at the bottom, labeled, "Always use my: Fonts"

In Opera, well, you're on your own, because I haven't played with it enough to know. I suspect that it's extremely similar, though.

What you're complaining about seems to be that the Web is increasingly becoming not just about content, but about presentation as well. I know, I know, that's not what it was originally set up for, but it's changed an awful lot over the years. Some sites just don't work right without the ability to say not only what is on a page, but how it's on the page. I'm not talking about not working from a design or coding point of view, I mean from a structural and stylistic point of view.

As for me, I don't mind. I say, let the site designers present the information to me the way they want to. Yes, sometimes it comes out hideous. Personally, I think whoever picked Bitstream Vera Sans for the ImageMagick home page should be shot. (In the leg; I'm not a capital punishment kind of guy...) If a site looks bad enough, I might avoid it site altogether.

But most of the time, when site designers dink around with the formatting and style, it doesn't degrade from the look and usability. Sometimes, it turns out really spiffy.

So unless a site proves that it's not worth looking at, I think giving them the benefit of a doubt and letting them selecting particular named font is perfectly okay.

Besides, who wants a world in which every frickin' web page looks exactly the same? I kind of like that there are so many different styles of presentation out there in addition to the virtually infinite content!

Imagemagick http://imagemagick.org/ will do it quickly and easily. They're tools (mogrify and convert, especially) are perfect for that sort of job, and you have complete control over every parameter of the final image, without having to navigate a maze of checkboxes.

Especially when converting from one format to another, I've found time and time again that imagemagick succeeds where other software fails.

The GIMP does it just fine, of course. I don't know if you use Linux, but ImageMagick is a great command line tool which lets you do almost anything on a number of image file formats; it's a Godsend when you need to do batch processing.

    I also used to do simple image editing with ACDSee too (JPEG conversion, resizing, rotating, etc).

ImageMagick!
You can do all sorts of transforms, scaling, filters, and conversions from the command line.

I'm sure some people out there would prefer a graphics editor without a GUI.

This is what we do at work. We spend about $5000 on the set up, but remember that this is an enterprise where we scan about 125,000 pages to .pdf a month. It is probably possible for about $500 or so, for what you are looking at (oh, and some programming)

First, you'll need a low-volume scanner. (Check the duty cycle to make sure it can handle you bookshelf of papers.) Then, you'll need something to convert the images to pdf. If you have any programming experience, write a quick app that uses http://www.imagemagick.org/ Image Magick to convert from tiff to pdf. Put each binding in its own folder, and pretend the "untitled1.pdf" says "page1.pdf" ;)

If you want to get fancier have the front end app rename the untiled1.tiff to whatever you'd like. Also, you can embed extra information into the pdf by using metadata and Adobe XMP SDK (free download from Adobe). Make the meta data like:
TITLE="My Book"
AUTHOR="Bart Simpson"
etc.

# Q. Where is the code?
# A. No code is available yet. I am still pondering the pertinence of allowing code in the wild. The good old full-disclosure debate... If you think I should release the code for PWNtcha, feel free to explain your arguments to me.