JS-R requested a simple method of turning the hi-res scans or photos that the field workers will be creating into manageable PDFs. This is doable with ImageMagick and GhostScript, so I've written and tested a simple script that does the job on Linux, Mac and Windows. The Windows version will be needed first, so that has more robustitude at the moment; the other versions need some extra quotes etc. inserted to handle spaces in pathnames more reliably. More error-trapping could be put in, and I'll hammer at it a bit more over the next little while, but the Windows version is ready for field testing. It's in the Landscapes svn repo along with some test data.
After some research and testing I ended up settling on this command for building the PDF:
convert *.jpg -interlace Plane -gaussian-blur 0.05 -compress jpeg -quality 85 ${FNAME}
This seems to give a good combination of size and quality with page-images. May tweak it some more at some point.
Ultimately I'd like to make this a drag-drop sort of widget, so you drag a folder onto it, but that'll have to be done in very different ways for each platform. On Windows, oddly enough, it JUST WORKS -- you drop a folder on the batch file and it runs with the dropped folder as a param. GN suggests using Platypus to create a .app for Mac.
It was interesting/frustrating to get back to writing Windows batch files again after writing Bash files. You stumble over the simplest things.