Legacy ImageMagick Discussions Archive

Judging by the size the original document is pure black and white bitmap.

however creating text in IM generates a greyscale image (edges of the text are anti-aliased). you also used a semi-transparent font too. In any case the TIFF image is also grey scale, A huge grey scale.

You can turn off anti-alising using +antialias so the font generated will also only be black and white.

However I am not sure in IM will save TIFFs as a bitmap or not. Someone else may know.

Prehaps you should try just reading and writing the TIFF image without change, and see how IM effacts the unmodified image...

Also IM stores all images as a minimum in RGB greyscale. As such a bitmap image has 3 bytes per pixel for IM Q8 and 6 bytes for IM Q16 That is a huge difference to a bitmap of 8 pixels per byte!

That is for IM Q16 your image will need at least 48 times the space it needed as a uncompressed bitmap disk file!!!