Pillow for image conversion?

[Urufusan]

IMO, using ImageMagick is a bit of a hassle (e.g. setting up the permissions, having to install it on a fresh system (or just can't, because of an environment like SteamOS)).

Why can't Pillow be used for image conversion to pbm? I managed to create a working implementation in my fork. Could it be that Pillow was avoided because of the contribution rule that states that no big dependencies should be used?

Fixed typos*

[NaitLee]

In the past Cat-Printer is designed to be portable so that one don't need to install anything from pip to use it.

ImageMagick is pre-installed on many systems, and installing it is simple in most cases.

Though, you are right, external deps are not everywhere. I thought to rewrite Cat-Printer so that it can work with pip, and further more optional deps like PIL will be acceptable. But the rewrite isn't going on for months, I'm not active coding these days.

I'd seek time to complete it, if I can. When that happens, we can implement things with optional PIL etc.

[Urufusan]

Perhaps we can use PIL in the current codebase as a fallback? Basically, the logic that checks for ImageMagick could fall back to using a tiny hack like this one, that's how I made a working library example in my fork.

[Urufusan]

I'd be happy to make a nicer patch and put it in a PR.

[NaitLee]

Yes, you may do it :)

Probably I should update the contribution rule a bit... Any dependencies are ok as long as they are optional, and that's easy to do.