Best way to convert pdf files to tiff files [closed]

Question

I have around 1000 pdf filesand I need to convert them to 300 dpi tiff files. What is the best way to do this? If there is an SDK or something or a tool that can be scripted that would be ideal.

Checkerberry

This is the solution that I use: [Pdf to Tiff using Xpdf's pdftoppm and LibTIFF's ppm2tiff and tiffcp (optional, only if multipage)][1] [1]: stackoverflow.com/a/12868254/551460 – Irrelative

any final solution with full source code sample ? maybe using powershell script.. – Rasping

@Rasping I posted one solution using powershell. See it below... – Checkerberry

Use Ghrostscript as gs -q -dNOPAUSE -r300x300 -sDEVICE=tiff24nc -sOutputFile=output.tif input.pdf -c quit (on Windows the command is gswin32c) to produce 300x300 dpi and 24bit color image – Tarim

Best way to convert PDF files to TIFF files? For sure: use pdftoppm, as follows: mkdir images && pdftoppm -tiff -r 300 mypdf.pdf images/pg. See here for details, usage, & more info: askubuntu.com/questions/150100/…. – Outrun

This is somewhat of a cop-out answer, but I tried Ghostscript and didn't have good success. On the other hand, Adobe Acrobat had an option to export the PDF as .tif files, and it worked perfectly for my needs. It output settings can also be adjusted. – Anaximander

Answer 1

Use Imagemagick, or better yet, Ghostscript.

http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/library/l-graf2/#N101C2 has an example for imagemagick:

convert foo.pdf pages-%03d.tiff

http://www.asmail.be/msg0055376363.html has an example for ghostscript:

gs -q -dNOPAUSE -sDEVICE=tiffg4 -sOutputFile=a.tif foo.pdf -c quit

I would install ghostscript and read the man page for gs to see what exact options are needed and experiment.

Campy

ghostscript works really good, as far as i understand imagemagick is reusing ghostscript for pdf operations. Is this correct? – Checkerberry

that's what I hear, but I'm not an expert on ImageMagick internals ;) – Campy

does imagemagick handle multipage pdf --> tiff properly? – Kristoforo

wow, ghostscript really needs to clean up its command line interface! – Carder

imagemagick worked well without configuration. I could not configure ghostscript properly to get a high resolution colour image. – Reinwald

convert foo.pdf pages-%03d.tiff produces horribly-low-quality images. How do we increase the resolution to be what is already in the pdf, so no resolution is lost? – Outrun

After tons and tons and tons of research, here's what I've decided is best: pdftoppm: askubuntu.com/questions/150100/…. Also, in case the goal if making TIFFs here is to use tesseract to convert the PDF to a searchable pdf via OCR, I've done that now too and written an interface to do it in one step: pdf2searchablepdf input.pdf--see here: askubuntu.com/questions/473843/…. – Outrun

Answer 2

Using GhostScript from the command line, I've used the following in the past:

on Windows:

gswin32c -dNOPAUSE -q -g300x300 -sDEVICE=tiffg4 -dBATCH -sOutputFile=output_file_name.tif input_file_name.pdf

on *nix:

gs -dNOPAUSE -q -g300x300 -sDEVICE=tiffg4 -dBATCH -sOutputFile=output_file_name.tif input_file_name.pdf

For a large number of files, a simple batch/shell script could be used to convert an arbitrary number of files...

Bartender

+1. Useful command. But my color figure is outputting in black and white. Any idea why? – Sibella

-sDEVICE=tiffg4 is a black and white fax compression model. See: pages.cs.wisc.edu/~ghost/doc/AFPL/8.00/Devices.htm#TIFF – Haematoma

Most of the time you want to convert a pdf to TIFF images of 300x300 dpi, not 300x300 size. For this reason, replace -g switch with -r: gswin32c -dNOPAUSE -q -r300x300 ... – Stoller

Thanks @HairyFotr. For anyone else visiting, you should be using -sDEVICE=tiff24nc for 24-bit RGB, or -sDEVICE=tiff12nc for 12-bit (8/4 bits per channel, respectively). – Talca

Answer 3

I wrote a little powershell script to go through a directory structure and convert all pdf files to tiff files using ghostscript. Here is my script:

$tool = 'C:\Program Files\gs\gs8.63\bin\gswin32c.exe'
$pdfs = get-childitem . -recurse | where {$_.Extension -match "pdf"}

foreach($pdf in $pdfs)
{

    $tiff = $pdf.FullName.split('.')[0] + '.tiff'
    if(test-path $tiff)
    {
        "tiff file already exists " + $tiff
    }
    else        
    {   
        'Processing ' + $pdf.Name        
        $param = "-sOutputFile=$tiff"
        & $tool -q -dNOPAUSE -sDEVICE=tiffg4 $param -r300 $pdf.FullName -c quit
    }
}

Checkerberry

After 7 years, this continues to be helpful! I would only add that a person who has no PowerShell experience, you need to: 1. Edit the $tool value to match the path and version on your system. 2. Open PowerShell and cd to the directory where the PDFs are stored. 3. Paste the code into the PowerShell window. I needed to press enter a couple times after to get it to run. Thanks gyurisc – Hoarfrost

Answer 4

1) Install GhostScript

2) Install ImageMagick

3) Create "Convert-to-TIFF.bat" (Windows XP, Vista, 7) and use the following line:

for %%f in (%*) DO "C:\Program Files\ImageMagick-6.6.4-Q16\convert.exe" -density 300 -compress lzw %%f %%f.tiff

Dragging any number of single-page PDF files onto this file will convert them to compressed TIFFs, at 300 DPI.

Grog

GhostScript is required ? If I only install ImageMagick ? – Rasping

This worked perfectly. Thanks a lot. – Viborg

How can we change color to greyscale or any other similar colors? Also it repeats the file name while saving. I'm using it on Windows 10 – Cobaltic

Answer 5

using python this is what I ended up with

import os
os.popen(' '.join([
                   self._ghostscriptPath + 'gswin32c.exe', 
                   '-q',
                   '-dNOPAUSE',
                   '-dBATCH',
                   '-r300',
                   '-sDEVICE=tiff12nc',
                   '-sPAPERSIZE=a4',
                   '-sOutputFile=%s %s' % (tifDest, pdfSource),
                   ]))

Svetlana

Generally you'll want to use subprocess for this. os.popen is considered deprecated. The syntax is nearly the same. – Shroff

Answer 6

How about pdf2tiff? http://python.net/~gherman/pdf2tiff.html

Diandrous

this does not handle multipage tiffs yet, so unfortunately this is no go for me. Thanks for the suggestion though. – Checkerberry

Answer 7

ABCPDF can do so as well -- check out http://www.websupergoo.com/helppdf6net/default.html

Sottish

Answer 8

The PDF Focus .Net can do it in such way:

1. PDF to TIFF

SautinSoft.PdfFocus f = new SautinSoft.PdfFocus();    

string pdfPath = @"c:\My.pdf";

string imageFolder = @"c:\images\";

f.OpenPdf(pdfPath);

if (f.PageCount > 0)
{
    //Save all PDF pages to image folder as tiff images, 200 dpi
    int result = f.ToImage(imageFolder, "page",System.Drawing.Imaging.ImageFormat.Tiff, 200);
}

2. PDF to Multipage-TIFF

//Convert PDF file to Multipage TIFF file

SautinSoft.PdfFocus f = new SautinSoft.PdfFocus();

string pdfPath = @"c:\Document.pdf";
string tiffPath = @"c:\Result.tiff";

f.OpenPdf(pdfPath);

if (f.PageCount > 0)
{
    f.ToMultipageTiff(tiffPath, 120) == 0)
    {
        System.Diagnostics.Process.Start(tiffPath);
    }
}   

Hourglass

Answer 9

https://pypi.org/project/pdf2tiff/

You could also use pdf2ps, ps2image and then convert from the resulting image to tiff with other utilities (I remember 'paul' [paul - Yet another image viewer (displays PNG, TIFF, GIF, JPG, etc.])

Plio

Answer 10

Disclaimer: work for product I am recommending

Atalasoft has a .NET library that can convert PDF to TIFF -- we are a partner of FOXIT, so the PDF rendering is very good.

Churl

Answer 11

Required ghostscript & tiffcp Tested in Ubuntu

import os

def pdf2tiff(source, destination):
    idx = destination.rindex('.')
    destination = destination[:idx]
    args = [
    '-q', '-dNOPAUSE', '-dBATCH',
    '-sDEVICE=tiffg4',
    '-r600', '-sPAPERSIZE=a4',
    '-sOutputFile=' + destination + '__%03d.tiff'
    ]
    gs_cmd = 'gs ' + ' '.join(args) +' '+ source
    os.system(gs_cmd)
    args = [destination + '__*.tiff', destination + '.tiff' ]
    tiffcp_cmd = 'tiffcp  ' + ' '.join(args)
    os.system(tiffcp_cmd)
    args = [destination + '__*.tiff']
    rm_cmd = 'rm  ' + ' '.join(args)
    os.system(rm_cmd)    
pdf2tiff('abc.pdf', 'abc.tiff')

Fury

Answer 12

I like PDFTIFF.com to convert PDF to TIFF, it can handle unlimited pages

Stackhouse

This site no longer exists. – Nickelson

Answer 13

Maybe also try this? PDF Focus

This .Net library allows you to solve the problem :)

This code will help (Convert 1000 PDF files to 300-dpi TIFF files in C#):

    SautinSoft.PdfFocus f = new SautinSoft.PdfFocus();

    string[] pdfFiles = Directory.GetFiles(@"d:\Folder with 1000 pdfs\", "*.pdf");
    string folderWithTiffs = @"d:\Folder with TIFFs\";

    foreach (string pdffile in pdfFiles)
    {
        f.OpenPdf(pdffile);

        if (f.PageCount > 0)
        {
            //save all pages to tiff files with 300 dpi
            f.ToImage(folderWithTiffs, Path.GetFileNameWithoutExtension(pdffile), System.Drawing.Imaging.ImageFormat.Tiff, 300);
        }
        f.ClosePdf();
    }

Abb

You should specify "pdf focus" comes with a price. – Nickelson