Hi, Edward:

After reading through the string of messages and the options that you list below, I think that #3 is your best option.  It seems to best fall in line with good archiving practices as I understand them (have one copy for public use and another for archival purposes).  If you really want to convert the TIFF to PDF and ditch the TIFF file, I would suggest using PDF/A, the archival version of PDF, if you can.  Best of luck!

Sincerely,
Jason

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Jason Curtis
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-----Original Message-----
From: Code for Libraries [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Edward M. Corrado
Sent: Friday, April 26, 2013 2:55 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: [CODE4LIB] tiff2pdf, then back to pdf?

On Fri, Apr 26, 2013 at 5:29 PM, Ethan Gruber <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

> What's your use case in this scenario? Do you want to provide access 
> to the PDFs over the web or are you using them as your archival 
> format?  You probably don't want to use PDF to achieve both objectives.
>



The problem I have is I have multipage TIFF files and I don't currently have a good way for users to view them. I also need to preserve these files. Ideally my use case would be to use PDF files created from the TIFFs for both preservation and an archival format. But, as I said, that depends on if I can recreate the original tiff. I have the option of creating a custom viewer that can deal with the the display of the tiff files, but I'm looking for other options.

So I have a few choices that I thought of implementing (that I haven't ruled out):

1) This is what I asked about. Make a PDF from the TIFF files. If I could embed the tiff into a pdf, and then at some point recreate the tiff if needed for archival purposes, I have my solution.

2) Convert the multipage TIFF files to individual TIFF files. This would work for my endusers, but would be more clunky than a PDF for them. The new TIFF fiels could be my archival copy.

3) Convert the multipage TIFF files to PDF (probably in a smaller, compressed? state), use the PDF for display/access, save the TIFF for archival purposes.

4) Convert the multipage TIFFs to PDF (or PDF/A?), and don't worry about being able to recreate the original TIFF files.

I should add, the content is what is important in these documents and they are mostly type written or hand written text. Still, I'd like to keep them in as high quality of a format as possible.

I'm sure there are some other possible solutions as well. I really would like #1, but it may not be possible. If it isn't, I need to decide (with representatives of my user community) which of the others are better. My guess is it would be #3, but I am not positive.

Edward






>
> Ethan
> On Apr 26, 2013 5:11 PM, "Edward M. Corrado" <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>
> > This works sometimes. Well, it does give me a new tiff file from the 
> > pdf all of the time, but it is not always anywhere near the same 
> > size as the original tiff. My guess is that maybe there is a flag or 
> > somethign that woulf help. Here is what I get with one fil:
> >
> >
> > ecorrado@ecorrado:~/Desktop/test$ convert -compress none A001a.tif 
> > A001a.pdf ecorrado@ecorrado:~/Desktop/test$ convert -compress none 
> > A001a.pdf A001b.tif ecorrado@ecorrado:~/Desktop/test$ ls -al total 
> > 361056
> > drwxrwxr-x 2 ecorrado ecorrado     4096 Apr 26 17:07 .
> > drwxr-xr-x 7 ecorrado ecorrado    20480 Apr 26 16:54 ..
> > -rw-rw-r-- 1 ecorrado ecorrado 38497046 Apr 26 17:07 A001a.pdf
> > -rw-r--r-- 1 ecorrado ecorrado 38178650 Apr 26 17:07 A001a.tif
> > -rw-rw-r-- 1 ecorrado ecorrado  5871196 Apr 26 17:07 A001b.tif
> >
> >
> > In this case, the two tif files should be the same size. They are 
> > not
> even
> > close. Maybe there is a flag to convert (besides compress) that I 
> > can
> use.
> > FWIW: I tried three files/ 2 are like this. The other one, the 
> > resulting tiff is the same size as the original.
> >
> > Edward
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
> > On Fri, Apr 26, 2013 at 4:25 PM, Aaron Addison <
> [log in to unmask]
> > >wrote:
> >
> > > Imagemagick's convert will do it both ways.
> > >
> > > convert a.tiff b.pdf
> > > convert b.pdf a.tiff
> > >
> > > If the pdf is more than one page, the tiff will be a multipage tiff.
> > >
> > > Aaron
> > >
> > > --
> > > Aaron Addison
> > > Unix Administrator
> > > W. E. B. Du Bois Library UMass Amherst
> > > 413 577 2104
> > >
> > >
> > >
> > > On Fri, 2013-04-26 at 16:08 -0400, Edward M. Corrado wrote:
> > > > Hi All,
> > > >
> > > > I have a need to batch convert many TIFF images to PDF. I'd then 
> > > > like
> > to
> > > be
> > > > able to discard the TIFF images, but I can only do that if I can
> create
> > > the
> > > > original TIFF again from the PDF. Is this possible? If so, using 
> > > > what
> > > tools
> > > > and how?
> > > >
> > > > tiff2pdf seems like a possible solution, but I can't find a
> > corresponding
> > > > "pdf2tif" program that reverses the process.
> > > >
> > > > Any ideas?
> > > >
> > > > Edward
> > >
> >
>