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I have large image directories that I want to quickly package into a single pdf for portability across pretty much all devices. Following the instructions of other questions I have tried a variety of tools in conjunction with cutePDF to unsatisfactory results. I need a solution that:

  • I can quickly tag a directory as the source of images
  • The images are in alphabetical order by filename.
  • The pages of the pdf are the size of the images. This is the biggest issue, pretty much everything I try shoves the images into a standard paper size. It either crops or shrinks it to fit, regardless of size, ratio, or orientation of the image.

Any thoughts? It will need to work on win 7.

3 Answers 3

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This freeware tool seems to fit the bill : manga2pdf

Here is a little tool (manga2pdf) I wrote that takes a directory full of images (png, gif, jpeg) and makes a PDF out of it, with one image per page.

If you are into Python, then a simple script will do the job, as described in:
PDF a Directory of Images using Reportlab
Automatic import of images from a directory using a script

Otherwise, a commercial product that supposedly can do the job:
Image2PDF ($38)
7-PDF Maker : Although the site is in German, an English manual is available.

(Remark: I have not tried any of the above.)

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You didn't specify what OS you are using, but this works under linux and likely under cygwin too. I think it is doing what you want. The images need to be tiff or be converted to tiff. The idea is to convert the tiff images to individual pdf files, then to concatenate the pdfs. For each tiff:

tiff2pdf -n input.tiff >output.pdf

Then

pdftk *.pdf cat output combined.pdf

The -n option of tiff2pdf is for no compressed data passthrough, and appeared to do what you want. Other options might also work (didn't try them). You could wrap the above code in a script to process all images in a directory.

The utilities tiff2pdf and pdftk are also available for Windows platforms. See these links: tiff2pdf, pdftk, and an example of use.

You could also use Irfanview to convert a directory of images to pdfs. Use the Irfanview batch conversion/rename utility choosing pdf as the conversion output. You can choose the way the image is stored in the pdf (uncompressed, lossless compressed or several options of jpg quality.) You still need to use a utility like pdftk to concatenate the individual pdf files, but if the command line pdftk is not to your liking, try the gui pdftk builder and its collate function.

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  • whoops, Win 7. Sorry\
    – tvanover
    Oct 23, 2010 at 1:18
  • I updated my answer to give more Windows options.
    – W_Whalley
    Oct 28, 2010 at 18:20
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For Windows user, I will recommend freepic2pdf, http://www.comicer.com/stronghorse/software/#FreePic2Pdf.

It is from a Chinese Programmer, so there is no readme in English. But the author provided an English version.

I think it is even more powerful than some commercial one. Here is some features I translated from its Chinese readme with the help of Google.

This software merge and convert image files (including TIFF, JPG, PNG, GIF, BMP, JPEG 2000) into PDF files.

For lossy/lossless compression jpeg 2000 (jp2 / j2k / jpc) file or JPG file and TIFF files that use lossy compression JPEG / OJPEG algorithm, the original data stream will be embedded into PDF file directly, avoiding image quality loss caused by re-compression.

For other lossless compression of image files, black and white image will be compressed with JBig2 (lossy / lossless) or CCITT G4, the others will be compressed into ZIP data stream and embedded into PDF files.

For black and white images, you can specify whether the background is transparent or not.

Support multi-page TIFF and animated GIF, each frame will be converted to one page.

Sort input files in different order( in alphabetical order, by the end of the numerical order)

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