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I'm looking for a free Windows program that will take images and convert them into one PDF file.

I want to scan a handwritten letter, so it would be nice to have it divided into pages.

Suggestions? I don't mind command line fu as long as I can understand it.

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6 Answers

up vote 16 down vote

Install Imagemagick. Open a cmd window and cd to where your images are:

convert *.jpg -density 300x300 -compress jpeg my.pdf

will convert all the images into a single pdf document. 1 image per page.

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Note: this works under Linux too, in exactly the same way. – rumtscho Dec 28 '10 at 17:59
works awesome, thank you! – dave thieben Feb 10 '11 at 2:19
If your JPEGs are already the right size, you can just use 'convert *.jpg my3.pdf' - since the original files are already compressed and optimized, there's no need to use extra CPU to redo all of that. – Johnny Bigoode Mar 19 at 15:45
up vote 1 down vote

Edit the images as needed, paste them into a word processor such as MS Word, or Wordpad and make sure the images are on separate pages and sized as needed. Then just print the doc to PDFCreator.

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Crude but serviceable, I'll bet. I might try this. – Nathaniel Nov 11 '09 at 3:35
up vote 1 down vote

You can use CutePDF Writer to create PDFs of the images, and then you can use PDFTK builder to combine them. You can get it here.

There is also a portable (for flash drives) version of PDFTK builder available at www.portableapps.com if you find it useful and want to take it with you everywhere you go.

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up vote 1 down vote

The best option I have found for this problem is FreePic2Pdf. (Note that the page is in Chinese, so I recommend you run it through a translator if you don't understand Chinese.) An English version of the program is available here.

A key difference this offers compared to the others is it doesn't recompress the images if possible. In particular, JPEG images are stored rather than recompressed. The benefit of this is there is no loss in quality or compression for these file types.

Main Window Options Window

Besides that, it also appears to have various other useful features and be quite customisable.

Note that it appears to only be free for non-commercial use.

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up vote 0 down vote

CutePDF Writer will do the job.

CutePDF Writer installs itself as a "printer subsystem". This enables virtually any Windows application (must be able to print) to create professional quality PDF documents - with just a push of a button!

CutePDF Writer is freeware.

Edit: here's a tutorial How to Merge PDF files

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BTW, any chance PDFCreator can do it? I do have that installed... – Nathaniel Nov 11 '09 at 3:05
sure, works pretty much the same way. open your scanned image (e.g. in MS Paint), go to File > Print, select PDFCreator as printer, click OK, give the document a name and click OK again. – Molly7244 Nov 11 '09 at 3:09
Okay, but what about pages? Can it make multiple images into one PDF? I'll edit the question title to reflect that. – Nathaniel Nov 11 '09 at 3:14
and i will edit my answer to address that. :) – Molly7244 Nov 11 '09 at 3:39
if that is too complicated, simply insert your images into a Word document or Powerpoint slideshow and print from there ... be creative :) – Molly7244 Nov 11 '09 at 3:43
up vote 0 down vote accepted

This is what I ended up doing:

I had page1.jpg, page2.jpg, etc. I used the Photo Printing Wizard (right-click > Print) on the first one then selected all of them. I chose a full page crop view and printed to PDFCreator. It does indeed create a page for each image. Handy.

The starting with one bit is important - otherwise it gets them out of order. Also, I don't know if the file name bit makes a difference or if you could just arrange the files in the right order in the folder. And... I'm using XP and I would guess it's pretty much the same for Vista and 7.

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