2007.10.04 18:47 "[Tiff] Pink pages with tiff2pdf -j", by Chris Gentle

2007.10.04 19:14 "Re: [Tiff] Pink pages with tiff2pdf -j", by Bob Friesenhahn

Hi. I hope someone can help me out. I have been trying to scan a bunch of old paperwork and convert this stuff to PDF. Basically I've been scanning individual pages into *.tif files and converting them to PDF as follows:

tiffcp *.tif /tmp/zzz.tif
tiff2pdf -j /tmp/zzz.tif > zzz.pdf

What does 'tiffinfo' say regarding the TIFF files that you scan? Does software like GIMP and ImageMagick display those TIFF files correctly?

Are you able to provide an original TIFF file and the PDF which was generated?

To my surprise, I found that all of the scans I had been working on for so long all appeared to be pink in Acroread, ghostscript, gimp, etc. I even tried converting my PDF files to other formats with ImageMagick but the results were still pink.

It is quite common for programs to use Ghostscript in order to read PDF files. Acroread is the only program you listed which definitely does not. Except for Acroread, the pink rendering could just as easily be blamed on something to do with Ghostscript.

I downgraded back to KPDF 3.5.5 and it still displays the images properly. I feel like this is a bug in the tiff2pdf code and that kpdf suffered from the same bug and displayed the PDF files correctly.

Quite a few bugs have been reported against tiff2pdf lately.

I'm hoping someone who knows about the internals of this stuff can tell me how I can salvage all of the scans that I've converted to PDF. If KPDF 3.5.5 can display the images properly then the data I need is still in those PDF files, I just need to turn off that pink layer.

The "pink" is easily removed but I would not worry about it until it is determined that there is really something wrong with your PDF files.

Any help would be appreciated. I'd also like to know whether anyone can reproduce this with tiff2pdf -j. I'm currently using tiff-3.8.2.

I just tried with 3.9.0beta but did not see any pink in the output.

Bob
======================================
Bob Friesenhahn
bfriesen@simple.dallas.tx.us, http://www.simplesystems.org/users/bfriesen/
GraphicsMagick Maintainer, http://www.GraphicsMagick.org/