Improving Access to Clinical Trials Act

David Traver

For Linux users, (see http://www.ubuntu.com/ ) the convert command is a powerful and easy way to change image formats using ImageMagick, which comes free with Ubuntu. See e.g. http://linux.about.com/od/commands/l/blcmdl1_convert.htm I have used this for single documents with complete ease, including moving from .tiff to .pdf and for all sorts of other image formats.

To convert all of the TIFF files in a particular folder to .pdf, first open a terminal. To do that, just go to Applications > Terminal.

Use the cd command to move to that folder and then use this command: mogrify -format pdf *.tiff This is very handy when you have hundreds of files to change. You can change them all with one simple command.

To use the cd command, just open your terminal, type cd and then drag the desired folder full of files you wish to change into to the terminal and hit return. It will change the focus of the prompt to that folder. Then, type mogrify -format pdf *.tiff and every .tiff file in that folder will have a paired copy that is in .pdf format. It's fast and easy. (you can also drag individual files to the terminal rather than trying to figure out the path names and file names -- its much easier than typing names.)

If you wanted to (and nobody would) change all of the pdf files in a folder to tiff, the command would be mogrify -format tiff *.pdf I just did it for fun with a large district court file and it pointed out numerous errors in the SSA's pdf files, but it converted them anyway in less than 20 seconds. You could use any kind of image format, changing tiff to jpg, jpg to png, or whatever.

After converting the files to .pdf, you could, if you wished, use the sed command to change all of the occurrences of the string .tiff to .pdf in the html file for that folder, which would change all of the URLs to point to the .pdf documents. See e.g. http://www.go2linux.org/sed-changing-words-with-linux-console-command

Or if you wanted, you could just open the html document with any text editor such as gedit, and use search and replace to change the .tiff extension to .pdf . Then, save the file with a new new name, and when you reopen it, it should point to only pdf documents in that folder and open them when clicked. This editing trick only works for htm and html files. It won't work for tiff or pdf files because the data in those files are not in ascii (text) form, as they are in html files.

If you have a server that uses Linux, but your office machines use something else, you could do this all on the server, and the users at the workstations would simply see new files to use. See e.g. http://www.ubuntu.com/getubuntu/download-server

There are a zillion things you can do to images with Imagemagick using convert, and mogrify See e.g. http://www.imagemagick.org/www/mogrify.html or http://www.imagemagick.org/script/mogrify.php

advocate · Joined: 23 Dec 2005 Posts: 52 Location: NE PA, NJ

I do not have Linux, but have learned how to do the same on my Vista laptop, using a free program one can download. It has saved me hours of work.

If anyone needs the scoop on that, let me know.

David Traver · Posted: Fri Mar 05, 2010 11:06 pm Post subject:

That would be good to know, please give us all the details.

Thanks!