18 Feb
2003
18 Feb
'03
9:33 p.m.
As I am the "scanner" of all the docs at mainecoon, I have
the original CD's (and in the mean time some 3 more...)
I could investigate the conversion to PDF, but it is quicker
if Jay tells me what he did.
I might (if sufficient interest from CC) create some webpages
that helps to get to the PDF-part that contains the info you
need. Saves on downloading other parts that are less interesting.
Better filesnames (no spaces, e.g.) would also make life easier.
Ed will have a real fast Internet connection soon, and he has
many Gb's room. We meet several times a year, and Ed already
suggested to host all the data. So ...
- Henk.
-----Original Message-----
From: Jay West [mailto:jwest@kwcorp.com]
Sent: maandag 17 februari 2003 21:06
To: cctech(a)classiccmp.org
Subject: RL02 docs in PDF (re:11/44)
I noticed the docs on maincoon for the RL02 were all in tiff
format. I got
them all converted to pdf in case someone needs them in that
format and
doesn't have the tiff to pdf conversion utilities. If more
than a few people
ask I'll put them up on classiccmp.org.
Jay West
19 Feb
19 Feb
4:41 a.m.
As I am the "scanner" of all the docs at
mainecoon, I have
the original CD's (and in the mean time some 3 more...)
I could investigate the conversion to PDF, but it is quicker
if Jay tells me what he did.
I downloaded the .tiff files. Opened them up in Microsofts image/fax viewer
(included with Windows XP anyways). Then I selected all the pages by
clicking on the top page (thumbnail view), then ctrl-clicking on the last
page (thumbnail view). Then did a rotate counterclockwise 90 degrees cause
all the pages were turned in the original. Then I printed them, using a fake
printer driver that pops up asking you what file name you want to save them
as, and it generates the .pdf file. This printer driver to pdf thing is a
commercial product that cost me money. Can't remember who puts it out, but
it works wonderfully. Basically ANY program which can print (under windows)
like word, excel, 3rd party apps, etc. can go to pdf.
If you ship me the CD's, I'll gladly convert all the .tiff files to .pdf
files and send you pdf CD's back. Also, with your permission, I'd like to
host those files on classiccmp.org as well - either independently or via a
mirror. Bandwidth and storage isn't an issue.
Regards,
Jay West
5:06 a.m.
Jay West wrote:
This printer driver to pdf thing is a
commercial product that cost me money. Can't remember who puts it out, but
it works wonderfully. Basically ANY program which can print (under windows)
like word, excel, 3rd party apps, etc. can go to pdf.
I have a commercial product called pdfFactory put out by FinePrint. It
has done all I have asked of it (so far). Available at :
http://www.pdffactory.com/ evaluation download available.
I have no connection with this company other than being a satisfied
customer.
-- hbp
5:15 a.m.
One word of caution... every single "evaluation" or "demo" or
"shareware"
package I could find that would do tiff to pdf conversion, stuck a really
ANNOYING image on every page of the resulting output that was their company
logo, or big letters over the middle of the document saying "evaluation",
etc. Royal pain. In those, you can get rid of it by registering. My
comercial one doesn't do that. There was a totally free one I found (dos
based) that didn't do that and worked fine. However, it would not process
multipage tiff files, only single page tiff files.
Jay West
5:48 a.m.
Jay West wrote:
One word of caution... every single
"evaluation" or "demo" or "shareware"
package I could find that would do tiff to pdf conversion, stuck a really
ANNOYING image on every page of the resulting output that was their company
logo, or big letters over the middle of the document saying "evaluation",
etc. Royal pain. In those, you can get rid of it by registering. My
comercial one doesn't do that. There was a totally free one I found (dos
based) that didn't do that and worked fine. However, it would not process
multipage tiff files, only single page tiff files.
Just for informational purposes, and to offer a cheap solution:
Under linux, I use the following commands to convert tiff files
to pdf ones.
tiffcp 0*.tif t1.tif
tiff2ps -a t1.tif > t1.ps
ps2pdf t1.ps t1.pdf
rm t1.tif
rm t1.ps
Adjust the command lines based on the names of the actual files.
The programs are:
tiffcp - Merges multiple tiff files into a single multi-image tiff file.
tiff2ps - Converts tiff file into postscript. You get a very large file
from this.
ps2pdf - Convert ps file into pdf
file. Much smaller than the ps file.
rm - Kill the multi-image tif file, and the ps file, since we are done
with them.
You have to do additional work if the tiff images have
strange settings in their width/height, but I have only seen
one scanned book that had this problem.
These all come standard with RedHat 8.0. Other *nix systems probably
have the same programs available, or can get them. I don't know if they
are available for Windows.
6:15 a.m.
On Wednesday, February 19, 2003, Kevin Handy wrote:
tiff2ps - Converts tiff file into postscript.
ps2pdf - Convert ps file into pdf file.
This seems like a neat way to go, but before making any PDFs by this method,
I'd check what tiff2ps and ps2pdf do to the DPI of images (any
downsampling?), what compression types are used in the PDF, what information
is in the title, author, etc. fields, what color correction profile is in
the PDF (I use none), etc. There are a lot of parameters to the creation of
a PDF.
--
Jeffrey Sharp
6:26 a.m.
I've noticed that the biggest pitfall of all the open-source PDF tools is that
they don't antialias well, if at all, so most documents end up looking
noticably crappier then if they had been produced with adobe's software.
Jeffrey Sharp said:
On Wednesday, February 19, 2003, Kevin Handy wrote:
- Dan Wright
(dtwright(a)uiuc.edu)
(http://www.uiuc.edu/~dtwright)
-] ------------------------------ [-] -------------------------------- [-
``Weave a circle round him thrice, / And close your eyes with holy dread,
For he on honeydew hath fed, / and drunk the milk of Paradise.''
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Kubla Khan
tiff2ps - Converts tiff file into postscript.
ps2pdf - Convert ps file into pdf file.
This seems like a neat way to go, but before making any PDFs by this method,
I'd check what tiff2ps and ps2pdf do to the DPI of images (any
downsampling?), what compression types are used in the PDF, what information
is in the title, author, etc. fields, what color correction profile is in
the PDF (I use none), etc. There are a lot of parameters to the creation of
a PDF.
--
Jeffrey Sharp 
7:53 a.m.
On Wed, 19 Feb 2003, Jay West wrote:
One word of caution... every single
"evaluation" or "demo" or "shareware"
package I could find that would do tiff to pdf conversion, stuck a really
ANNOYING image on every page of the resulting output that was their company
logo, or big letters over the middle of the document saying "evaluation",
etc. Royal pain. In those, you can get rid of it by registering. My
comercial one doesn't do that. There was a totally free one I found (dos
based) that didn't do that and worked fine. However, it would not process
multipage tiff files, only single page tiff files.
Then I guess you haven't tried using ps2pdf (and something else to paste
the tiff's together as ps), which is a part of ghostscript...
It's all GPL'd aka free-beer, free-freedom, software that runs under
Linux/Unix or (ick) Windows.
Pat
--
Purdue Universtiy ITAP/RCS
Information Technology at Purdue
Research Computing and Storage
http://www-rcd.cc.purdue.edu
8:14 a.m.
Yes, actually I looked at several things, including ps2pdf which I have on
quite a few FreeBSD boxes. However, I didn't want to do a two step
conversion to an intermediate format (postscript). I was concerned
introducing an intermediate format may cause image quality loss, the scans
at maincoon are great quality to me. I'm not sure if this is an issue, as
graphics are FAR from being my fortay.
Jay West
Patrick wrote...
Then I guess you haven't tried using ps2pdf (and
something else to paste
the tiff's together as ps), which is a part of ghostscript...
It's all GPL'd aka free-beer, free-freedom, software that runs under
Linux/Unix or (ick) Windows.
5:31 a.m.
Adobe Acrobat (full version, not the reader) contains a driver that does that,
and it's always worked quite well for me.
Jay West said:
- Dan Wright
(dtwright(a)uiuc.edu)
(http://www.uiuc.edu/~dtwright)
-] ------------------------------ [-] -------------------------------- [-
``Weave a circle round him thrice, / And close your eyes with holy dread,
For he on honeydew hath fed, / and drunk the milk of Paradise.''
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Kubla Khan
As I am the
"scanner" of all the docs at mainecoon, I have
the original CD's (and in the mean time some 3 more...)
I could investigate the conversion to PDF, but it is quicker
if Jay tells me what he did.
I downloaded the .tiff files. Opened them up in Microsofts image/fax viewer
(included with Windows XP anyways). Then I selected all the pages by
clicking on the top page (thumbnail view), then ctrl-clicking on the last
page (thumbnail view). Then did a rotate counterclockwise 90 degrees cause
all the pages were turned in the original. Then I printed them, using a fake
printer driver that pops up asking you what file name you want to save them
as, and it generates the .pdf file. This printer driver to pdf thing is a
commercial product that cost me money. Can't remember who puts it out, but
it works wonderfully. Basically ANY program which can print (under windows)
like word, excel, 3rd party apps, etc. can go to pdf.
If you ship me the CD's, I'll gladly convert all the .tiff files to .pdf
files and send you pdf CD's back. Also, with your permission, I'd like to
host those files on classiccmp.org as well - either independently or via a
mirror. Bandwidth and storage isn't an issue.
Regards,
Jay West
6:07 a.m.
On Wednesday, February 19, 2003, Jay West wrote:
I downloaded the .tiff files. Opened them up in
Microsofts image/fax
viewer (included with Windows XP anyways).
Oh, the horror. Get yourself IrfanView. It is much, much, faster than the
WinXP viewer, at least when displaying multi-page TIFFs and changing pages
on my 800MHz box. http://www.irfanview.com/
Another thing. Adobe Acrobat includes *two* printer drivers. There's
Distiller and PDFWriter. I'm not sure why there are two, but Distiller is
better. It gives you control over more things, like the DPI of the images in
the PDF. If you are using PDFWriter, I suggest you switch over to Distiller.
One caveat: IrfanView, TMK, won't rotate all the pages in the TIFF. After
you create the PDF you'll need to open it up in Acrobat (not Reader but
Acrobat proper), rotate the pages, and save. This, however, is a very quick
operation, and it also gives you the opportunity to delete blank pages from
the PDF or combine multiple PDFs into one.
--
Jeffrey Sharp
6:44 a.m.
On 2003.02.19 16:18 Jay West wrote:
I downloaded the .tiff files. Opened them up in
Microsofts image/fax
viewer
[...]
This printer driver to pdf thing
is a commercial product that cost me money.
Here is a free solution for us *ix
users, that I used to scan the "KA680
CPU Module Technical Manual EK-KA680-TM-001":
Scan the doc to individual TIFFs. (300 dpi, B/W) I did this with
Impressario on my SGI Indogo2 with a HP ScanJet 4c + ADF.
Use the tools from libtiff (http://www.libtiff.org) and Ghostscript to
convert them:
tiffcp -c g4 *.tiff all.tiff
tiff2ps -a all.tiff all.ps
ps2pdf all.ps all.pdf
rm all.tiff all.ps
The G4 compression is better then bzip2 for this type of data. It
compressed 560 TIFFs with 1 MB each to a single 20 MB PDF. A tar.bz2 was
about 30 MB.
--
tsch??,
Jochen
Homepage: http://www.unixag-kl.fh-kl.de/~jkunz/
8:17 a.m.
Here is a free solution for us *ix users, that I used
to scan the "KA680
CPU Module Technical Manual EK-KA680-TM-001":
Scan the doc to individual TIFFs. (300 dpi, B/W) I did this with
Impressario on my SGI Indogo2 with a HP ScanJet 4c + ADF.
Use the tools from libtiff (http://www.libtiff.org) and Ghostscript to
convert them:
tiffcp -c g4 *.tiff all.tiff
tiff2ps -a all.tiff all.ps
ps2pdf all.ps all.pdf
rm all.tiff all.ps
The G4 compression is better then bzip2 for this type of data. It
compressed 560 TIFFs with 1 MB each to a single 20 MB PDF. A tar.bz2 was
about 30 MB.
Yes but.... changing the multipage tiffs to single page tiffs is very
work-intensive... some of the manuals on the mancoon site have hundreds of
(I think one I was looking at was 600) pages. I needed something that worked
with multipage tiffs. I found it much easier to just click "print".
Jay West
9:56 a.m.
On 2003.02.19 20:10 Jay West wrote:
Yes but.... changing the multipage tiffs to single
page tiffs is very
work-intensive...
/bin/ksh is your friend. ;-)
I needed something that worked with multipage tiffs.
Well, the first command copys all images into one large multipage TIFF
for further processing. Impressario is able to scan directly into a
multipage TIFF, but I could not use this feature for other reasons...
I found it much easier to just click
"print".
That is why I found it nice to be able to make a PDF. :-)
--
tsch??,
Jochen
Homepage: http://www.unixag-kl.fh-kl.de/~jkunz/
7896
days inactive
7896
days old
13 comments
8 participants
participants (8)
-
dtwright＠uiuc.edu -
GOOI＠oce.nl -
hansp＠aconit.org -
jkunz＠unixag-kl.fh-kl.de -
jss＠subatomix.com -
jwest＠classiccmp.org -
kth＠srv.net -
pat＠purdueriots.com