Most efficient way to convert PDF to TIF?

OL Connect Professional Workflow
1

I’m wondering what the most efficient way would be to convert PDF to TIF with PlanetPress? I’ve got a process that will take in PDF via folder and then needs to produce a corresponding 200 DPI G4 TIF to an output folder.

  • I know I could go with the Image module by converting the PDF to PS first then running through the Image plugin to generate the TIF, but that seems like the long way around to get to TIF output.
  • I know too that I could create a Design template using the PDF as the data source and then create a output preset as TIF. But again, that seems to add overhead with the whole Connect engine where I just need to convert an incoming PDF to TIF.
  • Which then makes me wonder if pulling in a 3rd party graphics tool (like ImageMagick) to run via the command line plug-in wouldn’t be the best option.

I’ll potentially have 1,000’s (or even 10,000’s ) of these to convert an hour so settling on the option with the best potential throughput from the start would be helpful.
Of course, testing will be key, but knowing which direction to initially focus attention on would be helpful.
Thanks in advance!

2

To get TIFF files, the two methods you described are indeed the only native ways of doing things with OL Connect. For JPG/PNG files, you can use the native PDF To Bitmap task in Workflow.

You can also, as you suggested, run ImageMagick via the External Program task, I know some of our customers have done so in the past.

3

I’m not usually one to contradict my favorite Product Manager, but the Digital Action task does have the ability to process PDF files to TIFF directly. The selection of compression methods is limited, but any image conversion tool will easily fix that.

4

@fortiny: yes, but the Digital Action requires an Imaging license.

5

And that is why I use Ghostscript with External Program plugin. An Imaging license is too expensive for such a basic task.

6

I also use ghostscript for tasks like that. There is a stackoverflow thread with tips to speed up things:

1 Like
7

Thanks for all the input!

I’m going to start with the GhostScript suggestion and see how well that will work at scale.

For those interesting in the specific command line options to do this (currently without any of the speed up tweaks @thomasweber suggested).

In the external program plug-in I’m calling the gswin64c.exe with these parameters:
-dNOPAUSE -r200 -sDEVICE=tiffg4 -dBATCH -sOutputFile="C:\\temp\\%u.tif" "%F"
This creates a multipage 200 DPI G4 compressed TIF file.

If single page TIFs are needed instead the “%d” GhostScript parameter could be used on the outputfile to split each PDF page out into a separate TIF file.
-dNOPAUSE -r200 -sDEVICE=tiffg4 -dBATCH -sOutputFile="C:\\temp\\%u_%%d.tif" "%F"

1 Like
8

Nate,

you might give imagemagick aka “convert” a try, I used it a lot but mainly for image conversions.

Ralf.

9

@RalfG as far as I know ImageMagick uses GhostScript in the background for actions like that. Of course, ImageMagick offers further possibilities, but for this use case GhostScript is probably better, because it is more performant (depending on the own optimizations) and smaller in scope.