Converting MrSIDs into PDFs for Batch Printing

  1. Use LizardTech's MrSID Decode utility to convert the MrSIDs to TIF files.
  2. ImageMagick's convert utility converts TIF files to PDFs of reasonable size fairly quickly.  It, along with the other ImageMagick tools, also gives extensive capabilities of labeling and formatting the image into a publication-quality PDF, if desired.  GraphicsMagick is a variant of ImageMagick which I am using to develop Perl scripts that make PDFs with superior formatting.
  3. The pdfconcat utility by Péter Szabó then combines PDFs of individual pages into one large PDF. You will need the file config2.h to compile pdfconcat.
These are all command-line tools which work on many different systems. MrSID Decode is available for Windows, Linux, and Solaris.  ImageMagick is available for Windows, Mac, Linux, and others.  GraphicsMagick is available for Windows and Linux, and has been compiled on Mac.  The pdfconcat executable provided is for MS-DOS, but the C source can easily be compiled for many other systems.

The command-line tools are best used with scripts.

While I did not find it necessary, Nick Pelling's tiffdpi tool resets the x and/or y resolution of a TIFF file if desired.  Of course, ImageMagick's convert utility can do this as well.

Thanks to Nick Pelling, Glen Claston, and Greg Stachowski for their help with this.

September 3, 2009

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