So I gave up. So plan B[1] was put into action. I'm just bummed that I wasted a day farting around with Image::Magick - sigh.
[1] GD on linux.
Image Magick
ziggy on 2002-05-30T13:12:57
I played around with Image Magick about a year ago for a project to translate multipage TIFFs to single GIF/PNG/etc. images. Image Magick worked, but it was a complete memory hog and quite slow on top of that. The best solution I could come up with quickly was to use NetPBM (and hack a multipage tiff to pbm utility).