Imaging Experts

Why Convert Adobe Acrobat PDF to JPEG? Isn’t PDF better?

If PDF is such a portable format, why do many of our customers want to be able to convert PDF to JEPG?

Well, one great reason is that it makes your document much easier to view over the web. Your browser automatically views JPEG images, whereas Adobe acrobat has to be installed.

When offering documents to a large public user base, companies do not want to get involved with supporting many different operating systems and applications. JPEG has been supported within browsers for at least 10 years so it is a very safe bet, unlike any other.

Additionally, viewing JPEG images within a browser doesn’t require the start of a plug-in such as Adobe Acrobat embedded within a browser – saving valuable time for users. As all of us have experienced, even on a fast system, starting up Adobe takes a while, whereas viewing a JPEG is effectively instantaneous.

Imagine the time savings that a company, such as a mortgage or insurance company, would realize in its customer service department if files could be viewed more rapidly. (There are other options as well, such as using a commercial web viewer to view all of your documents through a standard web browser, eliminating the need for the creator application – and in the same environment you can retrieve, view and annotate documents and images).

Also, if you have a multipage PDF file such as an account statement or prospectus, even with Adobe installed, the entire file has to be downloaded before the first page can be viewed. For speed and efficiency, it is often better to split up multi-page PDF documents to single page JPEGs and stream them one at a time to the browser. Your users see their pages much more quickly this way.

The downside of JPEG is that the algorithm was meant to compress continuous tone images such as photos, not documents. Sometimes JPEG stored documents may exhibit artifacts or fuzziness around the text. Depending upon the document, other compression methods may do better than JPEG. As always, consult your imaging experts (Snowbound) for the optimum image conversion or document viewing solution to your requirements.

For additional information about the JPEG image format you can visit http://www.jpeg.org/.

Converting PDF to TIFF

The PDF file format is now commonly used to distribute and view electronic documents. The popularity of the format has grown because you can save your document from a variety of different software applications (MS Word, MS Excel, etc.). You can then send your PDF document and guarantee that your recipient will be able to view the document with Adobe’s Acrobat Reader. Also, since PDFs cannot be edited, you can rest assured that when you send your document that it will remain as it was when you sent it.

Another common file format used for electronic documents is the TIFF file format. It was developed in the mid-80s and was designed to deal with volumes of paper documents. These paper documents were scanned and saved as TIFFs to be stored electronically. The TIFF format became and is still commonly used for archiving documents. Since the TIFF format grew to become the most common format used for archiving, the legal industry and government agencies often require that documents are saved as TIFFs. This means that you may need to convert PDF documents into TIFFs.

PDF to TIFF file conversion is often accomplished by using a printer driver. If you are an individual user only converting a few files, this method is sufficient. However, if you have multiple users dealing with a large number of documents and images across your organization, using a tool to convert your images is a more efficient method.

Snowbound Software’s RasterMaster for the Java Platform provides samples to allow you to build applications that automatically convert from PDF to TIFF. Two samples included in the product both in the full and evaluation versions are simpleconvertionDS and converter.

-Patty

Converting PDF to JPEG

You may decide that you want to convert image files from PDF to JPEG format. Before you convert your files, you may ask yourself: Why convert to the JPEG format? First of all, JPEG images are lossy. That means that digital images saved in the JPEG format can be compressed to save space. This gives you the ability to adjust the size of your image file. By making the file size of your image smaller, you can load and send your image much quicker. Of course, you give up some of the image quality when you save your file at a higher compression rate, but you can adjust the compression rate so that the reduced image quality is barely noticeable.

Another advantage to saving an image in the JPEG format is that JPEG files are now a widely used format. JPEG images are easily accessible. They can be opened by many applications. It’s pretty much a certainty that viewers of your web site will be able to view JPEG files in their web browser. If you need to send your image by email, the person receiving the image most likely will know how to handle a JPEG file. If your user owns a digital camera, he is familiar with the JPEG file format and can most likely take and store JPEG images.

Another possible reason to convert is that PDFs have certain limitations. One disadvantage is that the user often has to wait for Adobe Acrobat to load and open your PDF file before it is displayed. If you have a large file, this can take some time. Although Adobe’s Acrobat Reader is very ubiquitous these days, you still are dependent on your user having the Acrobat Reader installed on his computer to view your PDF file.

Another disadvantage to the PDF format is that your PDF file size may be large. This will make your file cumbersome to work with. It will take some time for the file to load on a web site or to be sent via email. This makes it advantageous to convert your file to the JPEG format.

If you have decided to convert your PDF file to a JPEG, how do you make the conversion? If you have very few files to convert, you can use a printer driver to do your conversion. However, if you have large quantity of files to convert, it will be very time consuming to convert your files individually using this method. A solution to this problem is to use an imaging toolkit, such as Snowbound Software’s imaging SDK, and write a simple application to perform the conversion. Snowbound’s imaging tools give users the ability to convert PDF to JPEG (document to image conversion) directly without using an external application or printer driver. For more information about Snowbound’s imaging applications, go to their web site at http://www.snowbound.com/image_conversion/pdf_to_jpeg.html.

For another point of view, read this article on the advantages of converting from the JPEG to PDF format: http://www.investintech.com/resources/articles/howconvertjpegtopdf/

- Patty

Convert PDF to TIFF

Many companies and people recognize the power of the portable document format (PDF) as a relatively foolproof method of transmitting documents as WYSIWIG. For many people, that’s the desired end result and nothing more need be done. So when products are offered that convert PDF documents to raster TIFFs, those people generally don’t understand the point.

The truth is that when you convert PDF to TIFF, it remains a WYSIWIG, but it is much reduced in size. This allows the transmission of such documents over the web at a much faster rate. It also eliminates the need to bring up Adobe’s PDF reader – which is powerful but often quite slow. Instead, Microsoft’s Photo and Fax viewer will easily read most TIFF images.

In fact you can also choose to convert your PDF documents to PNG where you retain most of the size benefits of converting to TIFF and additionally you can have almost any web browser view your document directly. But that topic is for another day.

Many existing document storage and retrieval systems, even going back 20-30 years, were designed to work with TIFF. It is actually more of a universal format than PDF. A lot of archivists trust the likelihood that TIFF will survive to the next century more than PDF, both because it is less complicated and also because the standard has a life of its own, independent of any company, unlike PDF from Adobe.

The above explains why people like converting from PDF to TIFF. But what’s the right way to do it?  Because many people are converting massive numbers of images, the typical scenario is to acquire an application or a tool that efficiently and quickly performs PDF to TIFF conversion. And that application needs to be robust and reliable – remember many people are converting millions of documents at a time. Also, because PDF documents are created by dozens of different applications today, many who don’t conform to all the standards, when acquiring a conversion system you need to evaluate and insure you’re your system correctly processes your likely documents.

Additional resources on converting PDF to TIFF:

• Convert PDF to TIFF - Without A Print Driver
• Creating TIFF files for electronic filing with the USPTO

-Simon

Managing Multiple Document Formats - To Convert or Not to Convert?

The need for businesses to capture and store information is constantly increasing. This trend is a result of many factors — from the need to comply with federal regulations to a growing awareness that streamlining workflow and managing assets more efficiently can yield significant ROI. Many document and image formats exist to facilitate the processing and storage of this information. Companies often need to manage both standard formats, such as PDF, Word, and TIFF as well as proprietary formats, developed to fulfill industry-specific needs, like ABIC, AFP, and DICOM.

In a typical workflow process, personnel responsible for reviewing or accessing documents are required to have the creator application installed on their workstation. While this can be an effective solution, it is not the most secure, the fastest, or the most cost-efficient. Companies following this approach are dependent on many different applications and incur the additional costs of purchasing software, upgrading existing users, training users on multiple applications, and maintaining individual workstations. Infrastructure becomes exponentially more complex and more expensive in order to support the variety of applications and multitude of document formats.

Traditionally companies addressed these challenges with document and/or image conversion to a standard, portable format. A conversion solution can be effectively automated to process and standardize archived documents. However, the extra step of conversion can add time to an already lengthy process, biting into ROI.

An alternative, that is becoming more prevalent due to the growth of content repositories, is the use of a document or image viewer with built-in support for multiple formats. Viewers are flexible solutions that can act as stand-alone applications or be integrated into larger solutions or applications. They are generally available as client-based or web-based solutions.

Managing multiple document or image formats does not have to be a complicated, time-consuming, or costly process. Companies have the potential to greatly increase their productivity by making an informed decision on whether a conversion or viewing solution best fits their needs.

Some important questions to consider when deciding between these two solutions:

1. Why do you need to convert documents and images? Would a universal viewer be a more appropriate choice?
2. How many, and what types of document or image formats do you need to support?
3. Would faster access to documents improve process throughput and profitability?
4. How many users do you need to support?
5. Would access to documents and images over the Web (such as through a web viewer) be beneficial to your users?

-George