Print to .tif instead of .pdf?

Hi,

If using the Preview app will work, try that. Preview will open TIFF files and print.





Carolyn 🙂

I have to "control p" then use drop down box and save as .pdf.

This is unclear. What is being saved as a PDF?

Then go and open the .pdf file, then save as a .tif.

Why does it need to be converted to a TIFF? Printing the PDF through the free Acrobat Reader will produce the same results. If it's for archival purposes, PDF is certainly a ubiquitous enough format that there should be no need to convert whatever it is to TIFF.

Open Automator.
Choose the Print Plugin template.
Click on "PDFs" in the left-most pane.
Drag the "Render PDF Pages as Images" from the middle pane to the right pane.
Set the color model, resolution, and compression values to something nice, and choose "TIFF image" as the format.
Click on "Files and Folders" on the left, then drag "Rename Finder Items" to the right under "Render PDF Pages as Images".
Answer "No" to the question about adding a copy step.
Change the settings to "Make Sequential" and specify a new name.
Click on "Files and Folders" on the left, then drag "Copy Finder Items" to the right under "Render PDF Pages as Images", and designate where the files go

Save the workflow as "Print to TIFF"

Now, when you print, go to the PDF menu in the corner of the print dialog, and you will find a new item in the drop-down list: "Print to TIFF". If you select that, it will create TIFF images in the designated folder.... If you want, you can fiddle around with the basic workflow and do other things too (add dates to the filenames, apply image filters, etc.)

The workflow is stored in ~/Library/PDF Services

Our software only accepts .tif for upload to the system (our software for our business).

Hmm. I can't see a direct way to do that with most software. Word, Excel, etc. None can save to a raster format on the fly. J D McIninch's Automator solution would at least simplify it a bit.

ITSDISP wrote:
Our software only accepts .tif for upload to the system (our software for our business).

Since this is obviously a common thing for all of that software's customers to do, does the software maker have any recommendations for print-to-TIFF software for their users? While it's an extra step on the Mac to save a TIFF, as far as I know it would be even more steps on Windows, so I would think your company's software must have some suggestion for accelerating the generation of TIFFs out of all apps.

I think that instead of saving the image, you can have it open in Preview and save it from there. Then you would have the opportunity to name it or save it anywhere. But one thing I have wanted from Automator is a "Save As..." step.

If you need multiple pages in one file what you really need is a PDF, not a TIFF. There are ways to shoehorn multiple pages into one TFF. Usually this causes problems. It's a lot simpler to just use the proper tool, and the proper tool for multiple-page graphics files is PDF.

Charles is correct. What you need is a better system administrator.

TIFF is an image format, and much of the information that it saves is lost in the printing process. Requiring everything to be in TIFF is just an awkward waste of space. Multipage TIFFs are a problem in themselves, as few applications can handle them. If your administrator is requiring them, there had better be a very good reason for it, and I cannot think of any. That person should be answering all your questions!

Message was edited by: Bruce De Benedictis

Unfortunately multi-page TIFFs can, and usually do, cause serious problems. If you must have TIFFs, you should use one TIFF per page. If this causes other problems you might want to review your requirement for TIFFs, because the simple fact is that TIFFs are not the proper tool for the job you want to do. The proper tool for the job is PDF. You will encounter problems trying to force the usage of the wrong tool.

Yes, you can create multi-page TIFFs. However, it is complicated, and not all graphics apps can read them. And they are prone to corruption. Making multi-page PDFs is as simple as a trip to the 'Print' dialog; on Macs, it's built in while in WIndows it's simple to get a PDF printer. Generating multi-page TIFFs is nowhere near as simple. Your problems are due to your insisting on using the wrong format.

And, one more thing: if you're uploading the files to the Internet, PDFs usually require less space than TIFFs.