Legacy ImageMagick Discussions Archive

I have been using ImageMagick for a couple of months, and it has been amazing.
I can't figure if it can do what I need next.

I have a lot of images that are one page. At the top of the page is a lot of text. The bottom of the page is a drawing (technical drawing made by a draftsman). I need to crop the image throwing away all the text at the top, leaving only the drawing.

Here is a shortened URL to one sample source image:
http://bit.ly/FPRIBk

As you can see, its an image of one of my patents. I want to strip away all the legal text and just have an image of the bottom drawing.

Can ImageMagick do this kind of processing?

Thanks
Pat

One possibility is to scale the image down to one column (-scale). Look for the white spaces in the column. You can convert this one column to txt: format and search it with unix or windows commands. Get the coordinates for the last white space before the last non-white region. Then use that to crop out the bottom part of the image (-crop). Then trim that to get the minimum bounding area for the graphic (-trim).

see
http://www.imagemagick.org/Usage/resize/#scale
http://www.imagemagick.org/Usage/crop/#crop
http://www.imagemagick.org/Usage/crop/#trim
http://www.imagemagick.org/Usage/files/#txt

Make sure when you -scale the image you use a '!' flag, to not-preverve the aspect ratio.

Note for something a little fancier. You can use a user define distance function to get 'distance to first black pixel' in the first column. then crop that!

See example user distance functions in...
http://www.imagemagick.org/Usage/morpho ... tance_user

Distance functions is fast (just two passes through image).