{"id":359,"date":"2008-11-20T21:04:55","date_gmt":"2008-11-20T19:04:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/mattiesworld.gotdns.org\/weblog\/2008\/11\/20\/converting-multiple-images-into-a-pdf-on-linux\/"},"modified":"2012-03-14T00:04:08","modified_gmt":"2012-03-13T22:04:08","slug":"converting-multiple-images-into-a-pdf-on-linux","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mattiesworld.gotdns.org\/weblog\/2008\/11\/20\/converting-multiple-images-into-a-pdf-on-linux\/","title":{"rendered":"Converting multiple images into a pdf on linux"},"content":{"rendered":"

Update 2012-03-13<\/strong>
\nI don’t know if it was possible back in 2008, but nowadays you can simply use the convert command provided by imagemagick!<\/p>\n

convert image1.jpg image2.jpg output.pdf<\/code><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Normally, when I need to create a PDF, I can print to the PDF printer included with KDE. However, on my suse box, this only seems to work out of the box with KDE apps. Also, since I need to combine multiple images into a pdf, it is a bit cumbersome to use a PDF printer here.<\/p>\n

I didn’t find a one-step solution, so here is how I did it:<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. convert each image to a pdf<\/li>\n
  2. merge all pdfs into one pdf file<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    For the first step I used bmeps<\/a>, a tool which I recently discovered by accident \ud83d\ude42 It is strange, when searching for the tool, I didn’t find it. So that’s why I give it some extra promo on my blog. \ud83d\ude09 Bmeps is a cross platform tool (yes, I already once used it succesfully on windows!). It used to be a (E)PS tool, but since version 2.0 it also supports PDF output (up to PDF version 1.4). As input, it accepts JPEG, netpbm and PNG (and TIFF partially).<\/p>\n

    As Bmeps doesn’t seem too popular, I wasn’t too surprised to learn my distro doesn’t have any package for it, so I had to build it from source. Bmeps has a dependency on dklibs<\/a>, a collection from the same author which also needs to be compiled. But it turned out to be a pleasant experience: all prerequisites were already satisfied on my computer (except netpbm, but I don’t need that) and I just had to run the familiar “configure make install” (once for dklibs and once for bmeps of course).<\/p>\n

    After that, converting an image to a pdf is as simple as:<\/p>\n

    bmeps image.jpg image.pdf<\/code><\/p>\n

    Now we have a bunch of pdf files, we still need to merge them. For that I chose the quite popular pdftk<\/a>. It wasn’t installed by default, but there does exist a package in the suse main repositories, so that was easy. Now, to combine all pdfs into one:<\/p>\n

    pdftk input*.pdf cat output output.pdf<\/code><\/p>\n

    And that’s it!<\/p>\n

    PS: there used to be a tool png2pdf<\/a> from the same author for people wanting to convert PNG files, but this has been superseded by bmeps.<\/small><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    Update 2012-03-13 I don’t know if it was possible back in 2008, but nowadays you can simply use the convert command provided by imagemagick! convert image1.jpg image2.jpg output.pdf Normally, when I need to create a PDF, I can print to the PDF printer included with KDE. However, on my suse box, this only seems to … Continue reading Converting multiple images into a pdf on linux<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-359","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-linux","category-software"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mattiesworld.gotdns.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/359","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mattiesworld.gotdns.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mattiesworld.gotdns.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mattiesworld.gotdns.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mattiesworld.gotdns.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=359"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/mattiesworld.gotdns.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/359\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":547,"href":"https:\/\/mattiesworld.gotdns.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/359\/revisions\/547"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mattiesworld.gotdns.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=359"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mattiesworld.gotdns.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=359"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mattiesworld.gotdns.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=359"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}