PDF to TIFF Extraction tools and Auto-PDF methods

Because so many people have PDFs that they’d like mounted online and because so many people want PDFs and because PDFs are imperfect for preservation, I’m looking for a free or inexpensive (for non-profit, public educational institutions) software solution to convert from PDF to TIFF and TIFF to PDF. I know ImageMagick will do this, but I need the PDFs-made-using-TIFFs-in-hand to be compressed and to have as few artifacts/problems as possible and I haven’t seen how to best do that with ImageMagick. For TIFFs-extracted-from-PDFs-in-hand, I need the extracted TIFFs to be settable as RGB or Grayscale, 300 dpi, no compression, and single page (so a 12 page PDF results in 12 TIFFs).

I’d prefer to have a batch process that watches a PDF file and does the conversion automatically, saving the converted files to the same folder where the original PDF/TIFF file is. The main emphasis here is on automation–we don’t have people time for it, so we need to script it and have it work. By having it work, we also need to not have problems (or not many) with the compression size (for PDFs made from TIFFs) and the image quality. If anyone has existing scripts for ImageMagick or OpenOffice or any recommendations in general, please share them!

1 Comment

  1. Ghostscript may be able to do what you’re asking about.
    My best advice would be to poke around the Image Magick and/or Ghostscript communities online and see if you can find someone to help you. Or maybe you can find some CS student at UF to figure it out for you?

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