Joe Van Dyk wrote:
> 
> Ooh, that looks nice.  The image can be up to (and probably more than)
> 10,000x10,000 pixels though... that's a heck of a lot of memory.  And
> converting the data in Ruby would take a long time, I believe.  Too
> many iterations.
> 
You're right, converting from binary data to Ruby objects would be 
time-consuming. You could reduce this memory requirements by making the 
image a piece at a time and then stitching the pieces together in a 
separate pass.  You'd still have to be able to hold the final image in 
memory but you wouldn't have to have the pixel data _and_ the final 
image in memory at the same time. I estimate that a 10000x10000 image 
would take about 105-110Mb of memory.

Of course doing it a piece at a time takes longer. Depends on what your 
tightest constraint is.

If you decide to try RMagick give me a shout off-line. We can strategize 
a bit before you go to the trouble of installing ImageMagick or 
GraphicsMagick and RMagick.