On Windows 7, how could I go about creating a TIFF image from a) MS Word documents, and b) PDF documents? I need the equivalent of printing out and scanning the document, so I can mimic signing the document and scanning it using a graphics editor.
My preferred graphics editors are Paint.NET for raster and Expression Design for vector. I know the main document is raster, but I could do my signature in vector and add it as a layer in Expression I hope.
If you have existing PDFs, ImageMagick can convert them to image formats like TIFF.
Print > Fax > check option print to file and save as .TIFF
The Microsoft Office Suite has something called the "Microsoft Office Document Image Writer" which provides a virtual printer which creates TIFF files as output. If you have it installed, you can then "print" any Word document or PDF with it to convert them. You may be able to do the same thing with the virtual Fax printer built-in to Windows which has an option to create TIFFs instead of faxing them when you print to it.
Adobe Photoshop (and Photoshop Elements, I believe) have the ability to read PDF files and then save them in a number of different image file formats including TIFF.
As far as free software goes, although originally and primarily Postscript-oriented, you can also use the high-quality Ghostscript program to convert PDF files to a number of different image file formats (see Details of Ghostscript Output Devices). There are also some nice output viewing utilities for it.
To print document to tiff you can use PDFCreator.
Just print file as you normally would when printing to pdf. When you click Save button you will get Save As dialog where you can select desired output format, in your case Tiff.
To create a TIFF image from a) MS Word documents, and b) PDF documents you could use PDF24 PDF Creator. It is a free virtual printer.
To add your signature to a PDF document you can use the free PDF-XChange Editor. In PDF-XChange Editor you create a Stamp from an image of your signature (many image formats supported) and from now on you "sign" each PDF with your signature Stamp. In Adobe Acrobat you can create such a stamp as well.
For PDFs you can easily use the Acrobat Reader's menu function "Edit > Take a snapshot", then copy the snapshot e.g. to Paint.NET and finally save it as TIFF.
