29 replies to this topic

[fommes]

Hey all, very urgent question: what's a good, quick, free PDF to JPG converter?

Cheers.

[Stefancos]

With Irfanview you can save as PDF

[Wojo]

You can also load each page as its own image in GIMP and save that way. I recommend importing at at least 600 dots per inch (or 236 dots per cm, if that exists) for good quality.

But Irfanview can probably do batch conversion. I haven't used that program in so long, I had forgotten about it.

[Stefancos]

Wojo in Europe we also use Dpi.

[fommes]

Thanks! Already had Irfanview - but Gimp did the trick. Cheers guys.

[Jason LeBlanc]

What's a good, free program to downconvert a PDF from some insanely high DPI to normal 300 DPI?

[Stefancos]

What is insanely high?

[Wojo]

I kinda know what you mean, Jay. I used to scan some hand-edited technical drawings into PDF at several thousand DPI (and many, many megabytes) in order to capture the detail, so that when I reprinted them at 11x17 (or even the various drafting paper sizes), the detail would still be there.

You could always load it into GIMP at 300 DPI and then reprint back out to PDF, but this would definitely make your copy "lossy."

I don't know of a program to "re-compress" a PDF file. Adobe is garbage.

[Jason LeBlanc]

What is insanely high?

I actually don't know how to tell what the DPI is?

But its only 537 pages, yet is 1.5GB big, so clearly something is wrong. I want to shrink it down to like, 300 MB or something more reasonable.

[Alexander]

What's a good, free program to downconvert a PDF from some insanely high DPI to normal 300 DPI?

Adobe Acrobat isn't free, but it's very useful.

[Stefancos]

i agree Adobe Acrobat is THE program if you wanna create, edit and manage PDF files..

Jason, it could be either a DPI or resolution issue, what is the size of the pages, in pixels?

[Jason LeBlanc]

I have no idea. All it says is 11x17inches

[Stefancos]

That is the print size I assume. whcich has nothing really to do with either the amount of pixels, or the amount of pixels in one inch.

[Jason LeBlanc]

All I know is the file is 1.5GB and I want it to be smaller. I'll just start downloading programs that come up in google search if you don't want to recommend one

[Stefancos]

jason. Do you have Photoshop? You can import the PDF there and find out the resolution, DPI...etc...

All I know is the file is 1.5GB and I want it to be smaller. I'll just start downloading programs that come up in google search if you don't want to recommend one

Other then Acrobat, i don't know any (why would I?)

Just remember. if you want to print this document, try to keep the DPI a bit higher. (300 is standard in professional printing, but 200 is fine too) If you just wanna use it on your PC. 72 DPI is the standard DPI of almost any computer screen, why go higher?

[Jason LeBlanc]

yes I was going to shrink it to 300 DPI

I don't have photoshop or adobe pro

[Stefancos]

Amateur!



jason, if you have Irfanview you can open the PDF in there. Goto "Image"click "Information" and that will tell you the DPI

[Jason LeBlanc]

[Stefancos]

Resolution and DPI all seem fine. But the PDF is uncompressed. I guess that is the problem.

Speaking of PDF. This week I printed out John Takis liner notes for Star Trek: First Contact. Without adjusting the size or lay out in any way....

[Wojo]

Page by page, I would not use GIMP to recompress a 537 page PDF. Hell, I wouldn't use it to recompress a ten page PDF.

As for Acrobat being THE program for PDF manipulation, that is only because it is the first and most widely known. After you've been using the far superior Bluebeam to edit and create PDFs for engineering purposes for four years, it's very hard to go back to using anything Adobe.

There are programs that compress PDFs, like Free PDF Compressor (here, let me Google that for you...), but these work by removing duplicate items, and probably work best when the PDF is text-based. Like when you create a technical document in Word with high resolution photographs and extensive tables, if you don't compress and crop the photos inside the document, the resultant PDF will be enormous.

I suspect that this 537 page PDF consists of just images and no text. Like, hmmm, a musical score? The text it contains would be human readable but not machine readable, since it is a high-resolution snapshot of each page. Times 537.

Anything that Photoshop can do, GIMP can do. For free.

[Stefancos]

Anything that Photoshop can do, GIMP can do. For free.

Not strictly true....

[Marian Schedenig]

For batch handling of PDFs, Ghostview/Ghostprint would probably be the most powerful thing.

[Jason LeBlanc]

I tried using Nitro PDF to shrink it by "printing" it to a new PDF, but it crashed after 300some odd pages cause the temporary spool file got up to 32GB and I ran out of hard drive space!

[Stefancos]

that's odd.

I guess the printer increased the DPI to the standards of the printer (probably 300 DPI), which greatly increased the file size.

[Jason LeBlanc]

I'm having a coworker try shrinking it with adobe acrobat professional now

Every shareware program I've downloaded didn't work because the file is too big

[Stefancos]

Does the PDF consist of a lot of picture info? meaning pixel data? that might explain the file size. If it's mainly vector data then I can't image how it can be so big.

[Jason LeBlanc]

It's 100% images. 573 11x17 pages scanned in.

[Stefancos]

That probably explains the size. Basically you need to compress the images, like you would compress a jpeg file.

[Jason LeBlanc]

Wow! Using Adobe Acrobat Pro she shrunk it from 1.5GB to 150MB in minutes! And the pages look EXACTLY the same to my eyes.

[Stefancos]

Thats more like it!

Can you see what he changed?