Nitro PDF

[tsttm]

Those of you looking for software to manage (create, edit) pdfs, i just wanted to mention Nitro PDF. I've been trying the trial & it seems to do a decent job (i'm mainly using it to create pdfs directly from images right now).

Since i haven't been able to get pagebuilder to work for me, i need something to go from images to pdf. It's also nice because it has features to delete, rotate...edit pages within the pdf.

For me, adobe is too pricey & i'm not aware of free versions that work as well. (I use this in conjunction with free pdfill which does similar things but each accels in different things on their own).

I managed to get nitro pdf free after rebate. I think this rebate comes up once in a while.

If anyone has other pdf creating/editing options to mention; please do so.

[tsttm]

fyi, the free after rebate was at frys.com electronics. i think it's still on for in store pick up only.

i forgot to mention, there is shipping on top (so not quite free after rebate).

[bradcooper]

Hello tsttm,
My name is Brad Cooper and I work in a company which uses pdf files the most and in work I have to make changes in the PDF file. So I have used many PDF editor but there where only few which provided me easy and fast interface. I would like to give the name of the PDF editors which i use the most, and they are Illustrator, Photo shop, Fox it PDF reader and OpenOffice 3 = Free PDF Editor + Acrobat Writer. But you should have full version of all this software to use all the best features, you can get full version from the crack sites but I don't recommend you to download.

[qwer]

http://extensions.services.openoffice.o ... /pdfimport
http://www.accesspdf.com/pdftk/

[rob]

OpenOffice is good, but even now I feel it's clunky compared to Microsoft Office, much as I hate to laud Microsoft. I've heard some good extremely good things about AbiWord (also free open source), but I haven't tried it.

Of course, I think the goal here is to batch all the images into a PDF, without having to manually do it, and I don't think OpenOffice or AbiWord will do that. Unless you script it. And that's a pain.

[spamsickle]

I've mentioned elsewhere the tools that I'm using, but might as well repeat it here.

I use ImageMagick to convert from image files to PDFs. Formerly, that meant JPGs to PDFs; now that I'm using Scan Tailor, it's TIFFs to PDFs, but ImageMagick still handles both just fine. The mogrify command

mogrify -format PDF *.TIFF

will convert all the TIFF files in a directory to PDF files, while retaining the TIFFs. If you're going from JPGs, just change TIFF to JPG...

Once all my files are PDFs, I use PDFTK (PDF toolkit) to batch them together:

pdftk *.pdf output mybook
ren mybook mybook.pdf

If you're using Scan Tailor with standard output, and your book is less than 1000 pages, you can collapse this into a single step:

pdftk 0*.pdf output mybook.pdf

The first "script" will take all the PDF files in the directory and output a new PDF. If you're naming the new (output) file something.pdf, the "output" file will have a name that looks like an "input" file, which will turn into an infinite loop -- not what you want. So output some non-PDF name, and rename it after you're done.

The second will take all the PDF files that begin with "0", and output a new PDF. Assuming your new PDF doesn't also begin with "0", it won't match your input wildcard, and will work as you want. Since Scan Tailor outputs TIFF files that begin with 4-digit numerics, 0*.PDF names will be created by ImageMagick by default.

I'm still ending up with "image" files rather than nice tight PDFs with embedded fonts. In theory, I can run them through ABBYY to get text, and then use some text-to-PDF tool to convert that into a compact PDF. In practice, most of the books I'm scanning are not pure text; they contain images, tables, and such, which would have to be maintained as images anyway. I'm willing to give up storage space to save conversion time; your values may lead to different choices. Currently, I'm not even bothering with the ABBYY step for most of my books, and for those that do get the OCR treatment, it's still "text under image" for the "final" product.

I am saving all of my original DIY-scanner images separately, so if newer and better tools become available, I can go back and create a different result some time down the road.

[qwer]

Of course, I think the goal here is to batch all the images into a PDF, without having to manually do it

:) use tiff2pdf or ghostscript.

[nabritta]

How can I make a printed document darker when the pdf drawing is light? How can I make a pdf that is light darker on the printed copy?
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[phaedrus]

For converting tiffs to a single PDF I've found Irfanview + CutePDF work well on a Windows box. Both are free for non-commercial use at least.

Irfanview's useful for all sorts of image manipulation/batch processing but for creating a PDF I go to thumbs view (press 't'), select the image files you want to convert to a single PDF then 'file' -> 'print selected files as single images', print to CutePDF giving it the desired filename....

Cheers, P.

[spamsickle]

Thanks to jrichard's "Free Nitro PDF" tip, I'm currently using Nitro PDF instead of ImageMagick to do the TIFF --> PDF conversions. ImageMagick did a lousy job on the "Mixed" TIFFs that Scan Tailor produced. I use the highest quality setting Nitro provides (output for print) which produces a comparable quality result at a fraction of the size of the images produced by ImageMagick.

I'm curious to hear what results others are getting with products like TIFF2PDF and Ghostscript. The text in the files produced by Nitro on the mixed images is still a little ragged. On the mixed images, it's about the same as that produced by ImageMagick. On on black and white images, ImageMagick has better quality, but the files are 2 to 4 times bigger. I know I can OCR and convert text to real fonts in a PDF file, but I'm not sure how I'd preserve formatting and images if I did that.

I have to confess that I'm kind of feeling my way here. I don't know what PDF files look like internally, or what options are available to trade quality for size when converting TIFFs to PDFs. If anyone has insights, or links to insights, I'm at a point where that knowledge will be put to immediate use.