TIFF to PDF

February 11, 2009 11:49 AM

What is the best way to convert large batches of multi-page TIFFs to PDF?

Currently, we are using a pdf printer that cannot process multiple files as a batch, nor, strangely, can it retain the file name of the document it is being printed from. I don't want to print thousands of documents to PDF one by one, and copy-pasting to keep the filename. A standalone program designed for batch processing would be ideal. I did find this program, but I couldn't find any reviews of this company's products, and I'm somewhat leery of installing their trial version at work.

posted by [expletive deleted] to computers & internet (10 comments total)

Converting TIFF to PDF is a very straightforward process, as the PDF simply can act as a container for the TIFF images. Pretty much any paid conversion software you'll see is based on the free tiff2pdf utility that's part of LibTIFF. You can get a Windows version here. It'll only work on one file at a time, though.
posted by zsazsa at 12:02 PM on February 11

Apache FOP supports TIFF to PDF. You can turn this into a batch that will do large projects at one time.
posted by birdlips at 12:14 PM on February 11

I should reiterate here, in case it is relevant, that many of these files are multi-page TIFFs. I have no idea if this would be an issue.
posted by [expletive deleted] at 12:16 PM on February 11

LibTIFF's tiffcp concatenates TIFF files into multi-page ones. Alternatively, you can use GUI pdftk to join the source PDFs and skip the raster conversion.
posted by scruss at 1:06 PM on February 11

I have just tested the tiff2pdf tool mentioned by zsazsa with a multipage TIFF I had lying around. It produced a multipage PDF, mapping pages as you would expect.

The man page for tiff2pdf says you can use tiffcp to join multiple tiff files into one, in preparation for using tiff2pdf.

Whipping up a batch script to do this for you should only take a few minutes for a competent person.
posted by i_am_joe's_spleen at 1:07 PM on February 11

ImageMagick's convert command. Example: convert multipage.tiff multipage.pdf
posted by mnology at 1:23 PM on February 11

This line in a .bat file will do the trick (assuming you install libtiff to the default location with the installer):

for /f %%i in ('dir /b *.tif') do C:\Program" "Files\GnuWin32\bin\tiff2pdf -o %%~ni.pdf %%i
posted by zsazsa at 1:56 PM on February 11

Maybe not the ideal way, but you can create a Photoshop action to save the TIFF as a PDF. From there, run Photoshop's batch command and select that action. You can choose a naming convention and make other changes as necessary from within the program.
posted by HonorShadow at 4:50 PM on February 11

Photoshop can't really deal with multi-page TIFFs.
posted by zsazsa at 5:07 PM on February 11

"convert" from "ImageMagick" is a very good tool for this kind of things.
posted by zouhair at 4:04 AM on February 13