GIGI questions

[als at thangorodrim.de]

On Tue, May 10, 2005 at 10:12:32PM +0000, Jules Richardson wrote:
> On Tue, 2005-05-10 at 22:46 +0100, Adrian Graham wrote:
> > Hi folks,
> > 
> > Having repaired my GIGI power supply and found my local copy of the user and
> > techical manuals (big TIFs, I'm assuming there are tools available to let me
> > convert these to PDFs?) 
> 
> I seem to remember doing it with Imagemagick's convert utility before -
> from a shell or DOS prompt it's probably as simple as:
> 
>   convert '*.tif' output.pdf
> 
> (with scaling / rotation etc. hints as necessary)
> 
> I'm not sure if it'll "explode" multi-image TIFFs and append in sequence
> to the output file or not without any help. 
> 
> Note that it's *not* quick by any means and eats memory; Imagemagick
> buffers everything as 32bit internally (the one thing I hate about it!)
> so even if you have mono images as input it's still going to treat the
> images as 32bit before appending to the output pdf file.

Yes, it is a _serious_ memory hog and quite slow too.
 
> For that reason some of the alternatives might be better for mono images
> (ISTR 'tumble' does the same job, although I've never tried it)

Yes, tumble does a great job converting a series of monochrome TIFFs
into a single PDF. Any stuff I'm archiving is first scanned at 600 dpi
and saved as G4 compressed TIFF. The I create both PDF and DJVU files
from the TIFF images. Finally, the TIFF images (archived as a tar
archive for convenience - I prefer to keep the original scan data, just
in case) and the PDF + DJVU files are dropped into the archive FS.

> 
> Funnily enough  the first thing I do when I download a bunch of scans in
> PDF format is convert them to multiple TIFF images, as they're easier to
> handle in whatever app is appropriate for what I'm trying to do versus
> some sucky PDF viewer ;-)

Just for reading a scanned article I find the PDF version easier to
handle. But still keep the original TIFF files just in case.

Regards,
      Alex.
-- 
"Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and
 looks like work."                                      -- Thomas A. Edison