Perfectly scale an image to the rest of a page with LaTeX

I had the following problem for a long time: I wanted to embed a picture into a page and automatically have it scaled to the maximum size that possibly fits the page, but not more. Obviously, simply doing a

\includeimage[width=\textwidth]{myimage}

wouldn’t do the job, because if the image is more tall than wide, the image would grow beyond the page. One could use the information from the \textheigth register, i.e. like

\includeimage[width=\textwidth,height=\textheight,keepaspectration=true]{myimage}

But that doesn’t take already existing text into account, i.e. some description above the image that you definitely want to have on the same page.

So Simon cooked up a macro that would allow me to do exactly what I wanted by creating a new box, getting its height and subtracting that from \textheight. Lovely. Here’s the code:

\newlength{\textundbildtextheight}
 
\newcommand{\textundbild}[2]{
\settototalheight\textundbildtextheight{\vbox{#1}}
#1
\vfill
\begin{center}
\includegraphics[width=\textwidth,keepaspectratio=true,height=\textheight-\the\textundbildtextheight]{#2}
\end{center}
\vfill
}

I’m sure it’s not very correct and it’s possible to make it not work properly, but it does the job very well for me as you can see on the following rendered pages:


DIN A4 Page
DIN A5 Page
DIN A6 Page

And well, the contents of the image is a bit ugly, too, but if you know a nice bullshit bingo generator, let me know.

Sifting through a lot of similar photos

To keep the amount of photos in my photo library sane, I had to sift through many pictures and get rid of redundant ones. I defined redundancy as many pictures taken at the same time. Thus I had to pick one of the redundant pictures and delete the other ones.

My strategy so far was to use Nautilus and Eye of GNOME to spot pictures of the same group and delete all but the best one.

I realised that photos usually show the same picture if they were shot at the same time, i.e. many quick shots after another. I also realised that usually the best photograph was the biggest one in terms on bytes in JPEG format.

To automate the whole selection and deletion process, I hacked together a tiny script that stupidly groups files in a directory according to their mtime and deletes all but the biggest one.

Before deletion, it will show the pictures with eog and ask whether or not to delete the other pictures.

It worked quite well and helped to quickly weed out 15% of my pictures 🙂

I played around with another method: Getting the difference of the histograms of the images, to compare the similarity. But as the pictures were shot with a different exposure, the histograms were quite different, too. Hence that didn’t work out very well. But I’ll leave it in, just for reference.

So if you happen to have a similar problem, feel free to grab the following script 🙂

#!/usr/bin/env python
 
import collections
import math
import os
from os.path import join, getsize, getmtime
import operator
import subprocess
import sys
 
 
 
 
subprocess.Popen.__enter__ = lambda self: self
subprocess.Popen.__exit__ = lambda self, type, value, traceback: self.kill()
 
directory = '.'
THRESHOLD = 3
GET_RMS = False
 
mtimes = collections.defaultdict(list)
 
def get_picgroups_by_time(directory='.'):
 
	for root, dirs, files in os.walk(directory):
		for name in files:
			fname = join(root, name)
			mtime = getmtime(fname)
			mtimes[mtime].append(fname)
 
	# It's gotten a bit messy, but a OrderedDict is available in Python 3.1 hence this is the manually created ordered list.
	picgroups = [v for (k, v) in sorted([(k, v) for k, v in mtimes.iteritems() if len(v) >= THRESHOLD])]
 
	return picgroups
 
def get_picgroups(directory='.'):
	return get_picgroups_by_time()
 
picgroups = get_picgroups(directory)
 
print 'Got %d groups' % len(picgroups)
 
def get_max_and_picgroups(picgroups):
	for picgroup in picgroups:
		max_of_group = max(picgroup, key=lambda x: getsize(x))
		print picgroup
		print 'max: %s: %d' % (max_of_group, getsize(max_of_group))
 
		if GET_RMS:
			import PIL.Image
			last_pic = picgroup[0]
			for pic in picgroup[1:]:
				image1 = PIL.Image.open(last_pic).histogram()
				image2 = PIL.Image.open(pic).histogram()
 
				rms = math.sqrt(reduce(operator.add, map(lambda a,b: (a-b)**2, image1, image2))/len(image1))
 
				print 'RMS %s %s: %s' % (last_pic, pic, rms)
 
			last_pic = pic
		yield (max_of_group, picgroup)
 
 
max_and_picgroups = get_max_and_picgroups(picgroups)
 
 
def decide(prompt, decisions):
	import termios, fcntl, sys, os, select
 
	fd = sys.stdin.fileno()
 
	oldterm = termios.tcgetattr(fd)
	newattr = oldterm[:]
	newattr[3] = newattr[3] & ~termios.ICANON & ~termios.ECHO
	termios.tcsetattr(fd, termios.TCSANOW, newattr)
 
	oldflags = fcntl.fcntl(fd, fcntl.F_GETFL)
	fcntl.fcntl(fd, fcntl.F_SETFL, oldflags | os.O_NONBLOCK)
 
	print prompt
 
	decided = None
	try:
		while not decided:
			r, w, e = select.select([fd], [], [])
			if r:
				c = sys.stdin.read(1)
				print "Got character", repr(c)
				decision_made = decisions.get(c, None)
				if decision_made:
					decision_made()
					decided = True
 
	finally:
	    termios.tcsetattr(fd, termios.TCSAFLUSH, oldterm)
	    fcntl.fcntl(fd, fcntl.F_SETFL, oldflags)
 
for max_of_group, picgroup in max_and_picgroups:
	cmd = ['eog', '-n'] + picgroup
	print 'Showing %s' % ', '.join(picgroup)
 
	def delete_others():
		to_delete = picgroup[:]
		to_delete.remove(max_of_group)
		print 'deleting %s' % ', '.join (to_delete)
		[os.unlink(f) for f in to_delete]
 
	with subprocess.Popen(cmd) as p:
		decide('%s is max, delete others?' % max_of_group, {'y': delete_others, 'n': lambda: ''})
Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported
This work by Muelli is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported.