Subject: TIFF to PDF (slightly OT, but for a good cause :-))

From: "Robert Krten" <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun Jul 13 18:51:33 2003

I have the chance to pay some money and get my 17x22" PDP-8/I schematics
scanned, but they only offer TIFF output.  These will be scanned in 400 DPI
mode and put on the web.  These are a newer revision than the ones posted
on the web.

What I'd *really* like to do is convert them from TIFF to PDF and bind them
into multi-page PDFs instead of the one-per-page TIFF files that I'll get
from the scanning house.

Any volunteers?  Suggestions for *free* software than runs on FreeBSD or, worst
case, Windoze?

Cheers,
-RK

--
Robert Krten, PARSE Software Devices +1 613 599 8316.
Realtime Systems Architecture, Consulting and Training at www.parse.com
Looking for Digital Equipment Corp. PDP-1 through PDP-15 minicomputers!

---

From: Jim Battle <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun Jul 13 20:16:01 2003

> Any volunteers?  Suggestions for *free* software than runs on FreeBSD or, worst

I use c42pdf on a PC.  It is free.  It is fast.  It doesn't actually 
touch the image -- it just puts a PDF wrapper around it.  However, it 
only works for bitonal images (1bpp).

Do a google search on "c42pdf" and you'll find a number of hits.

Go here to get binaries for a number of architectures:

http://c42pdf.ffii.org/

I also know that some months back Eric Smith of this list was working on 
something much more flexible than c42pdf, but I don't know where it 
stands.  You can check for yourself:

http://tumble.brouhaha.com/

---

From: Doc <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun Jul 13 22:01:32 2003

> Any volunteers?  Suggestions for *free* software than runs on FreeBSD or, worst

   I can do that.  Framemaker w/Acrobat imports images and prints to PDF 
quite nicely.

   The PDFs won't be searchable, though....

   Or, if you want to do it yourself, it's fairly simple in Unix.  You 
need tifftopnm, pnmtops, and ps2pdf.  I don't know of a way to bypass 
the postscript step.

   In bash (I don't do csh, sorry):

$ ls *.tiff
  1.tiff
  2.tiff
  3.tiff

$i=1

$ for t in *.tiff
    do
     tifftopnm $t > foo.pnm
     pnmtops foo.pnm > ${i}.ps
     i=`expr $i \+ 1`
    done

$ cat *.ps >> big.ps

$ ps2pdf big.ps

   The only thing you have to watch is orientation - pnmtops will rotate 
a landscape image to fit a portrait page.

---

From: Frank McConnell <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon Jul 14 01:59:01 2003

> http://tumble.brouhaha.com/

Tumble thinks all the world is a little-endian Linux box.  I've hacked
on it to make it build and run for FreeBSD/i386 4.8-STABLE, and yes it
does need some changes, one being a kludge to deal with the absence of
<stdint.h> on FreeBSD 4.x, and another because of some expectations of
the relationship between <stdio.h> open streams and the underlying
file descriptors which I suppose are true under Linux but not under
FreeBSD.

Oh yes, and you will need Bison -- there are some yacc bits that don't
build under Berkeley yacc.

I have told Eric about my experiences with making it work.  He's been
traveling so I expect it's buried in his in-box.  I'll remind him
about it next time I see him.

-Frank McConnell

---

From: Jochen Kunz <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon Jul 14 04:49:00 2003

On 2003.07.10 03:00 Robert Krten wrote:

> What I'd *really* like to do is convert them from TIFF to PDF and bind
> them into multi-page PDFs instead of the one-per-page TIFF files that 
> I'll get from the scanning house.
I use somthing like
tiffcp -c g4 *.tiff all.tiff
tiff2ps -a -2 all.tiff | ps2pdf - all.pdf
The tiff tools are from the tiff / libtiff package that is in the *BSD
port / pkgsrc system. ps2pdf is from Ghostscript. 

G4 compression has a very good compression ratio, but works only with
black / white images. As you have schematics black / white would be OK. 
-- 

tschüß,
       Jochen

Homepage: http://www.unixag-kl.fh-kl.de/~jkunz/

---

From: "Antonio Carlini" <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon Jul 14 13:00:00 2003

> I have the chance to pay some money and get my 17x22" PDP-8/I 
> schematics scanned, but they only offer TIFF output.  These 
> will be scanned in 400 DPI mode and put on the web.  These 
> are a newer revision than the ones posted on the web.

> What I'd *really* like to do is convert them from TIFF to PDF 
> and bind them into multi-page PDFs instead of the 
> one-per-page TIFF files that I'll get from the scanning house.

1-bit depth works for all text that I've come across. Sometimes
8-bit or so helps with photos, but even there I used to scan in
1-bit and rescan those few pages that did not come out too well.
This may not be an option for you.

Once you have the final tiffs, you can convert to G4-encoded
TIFF (maybe they'll come that way anyway if you ask nicely, 
worth a try since you are paying!)

> Any volunteers?  Suggestions for *free* software than runs on 
> FreeBSD or, worst case, Windoze?

Well c4topdf will turn G4 encoded TIFF into multipage PDF. It may
turn non-G4 TIFF into G4-TIFF on the fly too, but if it does not,
then ImageMagik will (but seems dreadfully slow to me).

I used Acrobat 5 to do TIFF->G4-TIFF and Acrobat 4 to do multiple
TIFFs to one PDF, but then I was doing this in the office so I
didn't have to shell out for the s/w.

Here in the UK, A3 (really 11x17) scanners are coming down to
reasonable levels. It might be cheaper to buy a scanner and
stand in front of it for an hour than pay commercial rates
to get the job done. Even better, you might find someone
on list offering to do the job if you pay the return 
postage (I'd offer but I'm (probably) not in the right
continent and, more importantly, I no longer have access to
a suitable sheet-feed scanner).

Antonio
 
-- 

---------------
Antonio Carlini             [email-masked]

---

From: "Ed Sharpe" <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon Jul 14 13:16:00 2003

there was a time circuit city was selling a  11x 17 scanner  for  88
dollars... it was slow will not run under  xp but does work under 98.  maybe
it was a mustek a3?

I am sure anyone that upgraded  to xp has one sitting on the shelf and it is
unusable to them.

I am going to bring ours back out to scan large magazine ads to go in some
of the  radio and computer displays here... will have to throw together an
old system running 98 se though as it WILL NOT  run on xp here.

Thanks!

Ed Sharpe Archivist for SMECC

See the Southwest Museum of Engineering, Communications and Computation
online at:
http://www.smecc.org

---

From: "Ed Sharpe" <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon Jul 14 17:30:01 2003

HERE FOLKS...

HERE IS THE NEW VERSION OF THE A3
http://www.ausmedia.com.au/a3.htm

HERE IS A UK SOURCE FOR THE USB
http://computing.kelkoo.co.uk/b/a/sbs/uk/scanners/name/a3+scanner/type/Scanner/manufacturer/Mustek/115401.html

THE OLD  PARALLEL VERSION SHOULD BE LAYING AROUND LIKE CORDWOOD
CHECK COMPUTER SWAPMEETS.
Thanks!

---

From: "Robert Krten" <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon Jul 21 13:12:10 2003

Antonio Carlini sez...
> a suitable sheet-feed scanner).

Actually, the scanning was quite reasonable.  I had 22 pages
done, and it cost me CAD$35 -- not too bad when you consider
what postage would have cost, and they emailed me the files
right away.

http://www.parse.com/~pdp8/pdp8i/drawings.html

Cheers,
-RK