Re: Best common file format to use to create PDFs? ["Followup-To:" header set to comp.periphs.scanners.]
On Tue, 30 May 2006 16:30:29 +0100, Zak staggered into the Black Sun and
said:
Zak is obviously not a programmer, let alone an experienced one. Using
PDFlib from C isn't that difficult if you have some experience in C,
though.
And creating a PDF using only the spec would take a bunch of experienced
programmers a while. The PDF spec is really, really complex. Its
complexity is one reason why PDFlib and ps2pdf and OpenOffice's "print
to PDF" functionality exist.
Using tiff2ps -> ps2pdf says that a grayscale TIFF ends up converted to
a stream object that can be decoded by the FlateDecode filter.
YPDFEngineMV, obviously.
Depends on what you want. Get a good scan, and convert it to
black-and-white if you can do that without losing important info;
that'll make the PDF smaller. JPEG may introduce artifacts, so you
probably don't want to use that. TIFF G4 and TIFF LZW are lossless, so
you may want to use those.
Yuck. The original WordPerfect or whatever file would've been a much
better place to start from. PDFs with just text in them tend to be
smaller, display faster, and can look good at any zoom level. PDFs made
from images take a longer time to display, are larger, and look terrible
at high zoom levels.
? You're creating a PDF, not distributing a series of image files.
This is because of Hysterical Raisins in the history of web browsers,
and because of Unisys being asses. JPEG compresses better than TIFF-LZW
for lossy color images, and smaller images are preferred, especially when
you're on dialup. TIFF-LZW gives the best lossless compression for
color images, but TIFF-LZW is usually used where losslessness is more
important than file size (like in prepress.) Also, Unisys said they'd
sue anyone who made a TIFF-LZW compressor unless they paid Unisys a
license fee.[0] These things combined made it so that the earliest GUI
browsers didn't support viewing TIFFs, just JPEGs and GIFs. And this
has persisted to the present day... even though TIFF-G4 compresses
better than *anything* else, and does so losslessly, iff your image is
black-and-white.
....what? If somebody can't figure out how to view a Group4 TIFF,
they're probably computer-illiterate. Anyway, aren't you making a PDF
here? It doesn't matter what the original image format was if it's been
PDFed. Acrobrat Reader can decode the image data within a PDF, as long
as the PDF library/PDF writer/whatever that created that PDF wasn't
smoking crack. Anyway, HTH,
[0] Fortunately, their patent (on a *mathematical method*!) expired a
couple of years ago, so all the Free stuff can write LZW now, which is a
win for everybody.
--
Matt G|There is no Darkness in eternity/But only Light too dim for us to see
Screw up your courage! You've screwed up everything else.
Dances With Crows
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