Help me choose an app that converts images into PDF files
 

Hi everyone.

First of all, I'd like to say I'm a perfectionist, so I'll not accept what doesn't fully fulfill my requirements. Good thing you're not obliged to help me :).

I want an app that does what is described in the title. I'm currently using PDFArea Image to PDF Converter Free, which is the best one I've tested, except for two thing:
- the images get JPEG-ed and lose quality;
- if I mix two images of different sizes, it adds white space on all images to make them have the same size.

The others I've tested would change the size of the images, as if they came straight out of a text editor, in A4.

I don't care for what platform it's made, can even be for MacOS, I'll find a way to have a virtual machine of it.

I don't care if it makes one file per image, as I can merge them with pdfsam, and that's a good piece of software.

All I want is that it be free and make the PDF file exactly as the original image, so that if I zoom it to 100% I'll see the same as the original image zoomed to 100%.

Also, if you could recommend me a forum more related to the subject, I'd be grateful. I though of Adobe, but I don't know how they would react to someone asking for free software.

Thanks in advance.

ImageMagick.

What I use for this is LibreOffice Draw. Create as many pages as you wish, and then insert the images on them (you can resize them to your needs, or you can leave them in their original size), then go to "File > Export to PDF file" (or something like that, I'm on a Windows machine at the moment). You will see a dialog box where you can change the quality and export settings. Click on "Export" and you're done.

Did the same as most programs I tested.

I attached a piece of the original image and the resulting PDF file, both being visualized at 100%.

Did worse than the other one, as I have to tweak the page size manually, which doesn't change a thing. At the "Original Size", the image have the same size as when using other programs, and if I resize the image I'll have the same size as the original but lower quality.

Try "convert -density 75x75 page1.png page2.png page3.png pages.pdf" When viewing, remember to set it to 100% and not fit to width. Note that I tested this with several jpegs and your original.png file.

Before this, I tried converting the pictures to EPS before creating the pdf. This helped unless the pictures were larger than what would be printed on page. Then the picture would be cropped.

The pictures I used were about 600x800 in size. The "original.png" looked smaller then I was expecting. The pictures looked normal (75 dpi is native for jpegs). So I used
convert -density 75x75 picdir/*.jpg -density 25x25 original.png testdoc.pdf
This looked better and the graphic didn't look distorted.

It succeeded to change the size of the pages, but I'd have to find the right value instead of 75, which is not an optimal solution.

The images are far larger than the standard page size. That's one major point of this thread.

They actually have a size of 1700x2339. I though a piece of it would be necessary, and for some reason I though that it was too big to be uploaded. I was wrong. It's another page, but the image attached to this post is the original one, as it came out of the scanner, converted when uploaded, which caused it to lose a pixel on every dimension and a bit of quality. The other is the resulting PDF, again being shown at 100%, were I took 3 screenshots and merged together with GIMP.

They were scanned at 200 dpi.

I forgot to mention something. Before I had this scanner, which is a HP Photosmart D110a, I used my college's scanner, a HP Scanjet G2410. The latter have a wonderful imaging software, which scans directly to PDF, exactly the way I'm trying to do, except it have an algorithm that tilts the pages a bit to make horizontal lines more horizontal, but except when they fail, that doesn't bother me. The imaging software of my own scanner is far less capable and harder to use, such that I use Microsoft Paint to scan.

EDIT:

I give up. Not just because it's hard, but I opened an old PDF file I made with the HP Scanjet G2410 and it looked just like what I'm getting now! Everything is presented in A4, although I believe the original image's resolution is preserved, but there's no way to see it at 100% easily. I even made a new file with the same scanner and got the same result. Pretty sure it wasn't like that several months ago when I made the old file. So I can only imagine it's a "feature" of the newer PDF specifications. So I gave up on saving collections of images on PDFs.

I just won't set this as closed for I'm not sure of this and it might still be possible to do what I want.