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I have finally found a third-party program that can do dilation besides AutoImager!
This program is part of the wonderful NetPBM package which unfortunately seems to sit in ImageMagick's shadow yet offers much more powerful functionality in an easier to use interface. It has allowed me to do dilate, simple average-based downsampling*, and even produce pngs with exactly the colors the Sony Reader can display.** Also, images seem to come out much clearer due to better dithering.
In NetPBM I've also discovered an "edge enhancement" filter which seems like it could do a better job than the sharpening filter. This remains to be verified by you guys.
One downside of NetPBM is that it is considerably slower. Sigh. Because of this and also in case you like the sharpening more (and also to let you compare before and after since the sharpening could be put into the new path***), i'll keep the AutoImager/ImageMagick processing path (with the tweak to sharpening that I put into the defunct 2.2.x but never included in the stable 2.1.x series.)
anyway, stay tuned for PDFrasterFarian 2.3.0. I'll release it soon.
now... i still have to add djvu/images support and a goddamn gui (or at least a normal installer... not something that's really needed, but something that would make new users more comfortable).
* the advanced filtering that imagemagick always does and doesn't allow you to turn off results in a blurrier image.
** imagemagick would try to find the four "optimal" colors to create its palette. These colors would often turn out to not be exactly the ones that the Reader uses, resulting in a 2nd round of dithering. netpbm lets me specify the palette explicitly.
*** one annoying thing is that to do a sharpening in netpbm, you have to call like three commands to create intermediate masks and other bs. this is more powerful, but it's much slower and there should be a quick path.
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