I have a whole lot of old magazine articles in a mix of TIF and JPG format -- one file per page. The provided viewer software for this is an awful Windows program, so I want to convert them to PDF.
I'm using imagemagick; given the whole set of TIF and JPG files in order on the command line, it converts the whole lot to one postscript file just fine.. [*] The only problem is that it reads the entire set of tif/jpg files into memory and it's using roughly 248Mb of RAM for 30 pages. Unfortunately I only have 128Mb of RAM, so it spends the whole time swapping! It's taking roughly 13 minutes per set as a result; the generated postscript files are about 191Mb. [*] I convert the PS files to PDF with ghostscript's ps2pdf; imagemagick can convert direct to PDF but the resulting files are larger. Anyone know a better way? I've tried converting page by page and then merging them using either psmerge (which generates no output except postscript headers), and another run of convert (which works but ruins the quality in the process -- don't know why). tiff2ps does a quicker job of converting the TIFF files, but only does one at a time and doesn't do JPG. Does anyone know a quicker way of doing this conversion? How about how to make 'convert' merge postscript files without ruining the quality? Unfortunately it's still likely to read the whole lot into RAM (ie swap). Perhaps I should use the crap Windows software along with Acrobat PDF Writer on Windows to do it.. thanks Hamish -- Hamish Moffatt VK3SB. CCs of replies on mailing lists are welcome.
