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Are there any free utilities that will batch convert TIFF files to PDF? I've tried PDF printers like PrimoPDF & CutePDF, but these seem to require a GUI click to confirm each filename.

What I'm after is a script, command line or context menu utility that would allow the conversion of hundreds of files using the same filename (save extension, natch) as the original file and placing the output in the same folder.

Edit: I should've stated Windows only!

5 Answers 5

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You can try ImageMagick. I'm trying this on Linux, but it's available for Windows as well. I just have to type: convert example.tiff example.pdf and I get a PDF. With just a little batch magic, you should be able to easily convert a directory of tiff files to pdf.

Or, if you need all tiffs in the same PDF, you can do convert example1.tiff example2.tiff example.pdf.

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  • I hadn't thought of using ImageMagick. I've already got it installed and it works just the same from the command line in Windows. With a bit of VBScript I'm sure I can get this working, thanks!
    – Lunatik
    Dec 10, 2009 at 12:04
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The tiff2pdf mentioned in Bobby's answer is probably part of libtiff, and you can get Windows binaries through the GnuWin32 project. The Cygwin environment probably includes a libtiff package as well, though I haven't verified. Both Cygwin and GnuWin32 versions are free software.

Davince Tools (sic) includes a scriptable commandline tiff2pdf utility for Windows. This is a shareware toolkit.

Dreamsys Software also provides a Tiff-to-PDF converter (download). This appears free to use.

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  • Upvoted! Dreamsys Tif2PDF does not support multi-page tiffs
    – user423430
    Oct 7, 2014 at 15:49
  • As of September 2023, libtiff's tiff2pdf is now deprecated so will unfortunately be going away soon.
    – Malvineous
    Oct 22, 2023 at 2:21
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Using ImageMagick as follows should also work:

convert ^
   c:\your\current\directory\*.tif ^
   c:\your\output\directory\allimagestogether.pdf
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Since tiff2pdf is now deprecated, ImageMagick is probably the best option, however a few extra options are needed so I am documenting this here in case anyone else is trying to figure out how to switch from tiff2pdf to ImageMagick.

In order to reproduce what tiff2pdf used to do for full colour scanned documents, some of these extra options are needed:

magick -compress jpeg -quality 75 -units PixelsPerInch -density 300x300 -define pdf:title= -define pdf:author= output.pdf
  • -compress matches tiff2pdf's -j option, if you were using it
  • -quality matches tiff2pdf's -q option (to set JPEG quality as a percentage, lower values compress more, higher values look better)
  • -units PixelsPerInch and -density are required in order for the PDF page size to display properly. 300x300 should match your image density (e.g. if you scanned the image at 600 dpi then specify -density 600x600)
  • -define will remove some metadata that ImageMagick adds to the PDF. You can specify values here if you still want the fields but want to set them to something else. If you omit the -define that removes the document title, the PDF title will be set to the input filename, so you'll see the original filename even if later you rename the PDF file to something else.

You can confirm this is all correct by using the pdfinfo utility. If you run pdfinfo output.pdf check the "Page size" value, it should be something like 842.04 x 595.32 pts (A4) where the page size is shown in brackets (A4, Letter, etc.) If you haven't set the -density value properly, the page size won't appear in brackets, and you'll likely have problems if anyone ever tries to print the PDF as it may come out on the wrong paper size (e.g. on A3 paper instead of A4 if the printer has trays for both) or complain that the document won't fit on any paper in any of the printer's trays.

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  • 1
    @KJ No argument there, perhaps you can make that case to the libtiff team to get them to reinstate tiff2pdf, which might do a better job of matching TIFF variants to PDF variants, assuming ImageMagick does not do this to some extent already. I've updated my answer to state that this is only for full colour scanned images which was my use case, as it had slipped my mind that this will produce inferior results for other variants such as 1-bit monochrome.
    – Malvineous
    Oct 22, 2023 at 15:55
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There seems to be plenty of solutions out there for this. At least I found one for Linux which is called tiff2pdf and should be available through your software channel.

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  • Ahh, Windows here I'm afraid. Thanks anyway :)
    – Lunatik
    Dec 10, 2009 at 11:04

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