Convert TIFF to PDF
Document scanners have written multi-page TIFF for decades, and almost nothing a recipient owns will open one. PDF is what a scanned document is supposed to be — same pages, same order, one file, opens everywhere.
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What it does
- Every page of a multi-page TIFF becomes a page of the PDF
- Page order preserved exactly as the scanner wrote it
- Opens on any phone, browser or reader without extra software
- No watermark and no sign-up
How to use TIFF to PDF
- 1
Add the TIFF
Output from a document scanner, a fax archive, or a records system. Single-page and multi-page files are both fine, and .tif and .tiff are the same format.
- 2
Convert
Each page is rendered and placed onto a PDF page in order. Long documents take proportionally longer, since every page is real work.
- 3
Check the page count and orientation
Open the result and confirm it has as many pages as the original and that none arrived rotated. Scanners record orientation inconsistently, and that is the thing worth catching now rather than after sending it.
How it works
The TIFF is opened as a document rather than as an image. Each page inside it is rendered in turn and placed onto its own PDF page, in the order the file stores them.
That per-page handling is the whole point. TIFF is one of very few image formats that can hold a sequence of pages, and it is the reason document scanners chose it — but it is also why converting one with an ordinary image tool gives back a single page and quietly loses the rest.
Why scanners write TIFF in the first place
The format predates PDF as a scanning target and had the two properties the job needed: several pages in one file, and CCITT Group 4 compression, which is built specifically for black-and-white page images and is extremely efficient on them.
Fax machines used the same compression, which is why fax archives are so often TIFF. Records systems, medical imaging and legal discovery platforms standardized on it for the same reasons and, being records systems, never moved.
The result is a large amount of institutional history sitting in a format that opens in specialist software and almost nothing else.
What to check on the result
The page count. It should match. If it does not, the source may store its pages in a variant the renderer read as a single image.
Orientation. Scanners record rotation in a metadata tag that different software honors differently. A page that appears sideways is following a tag, not corrupted, and rotating it in a PDF tool afterwards is quick.
Contrast on Group 4 scans. Bitonal compression stores pure black and pure white with nothing between. Faint pencil, light stamps and pale signatures may be missing because the scanner decided they were background — that loss happened at scan time and no conversion recovers it.
When PDF is not the right target
One page going to one person. JPEG is smaller and previews inline in most mail clients.
Anything you intend to edit as an image. Stay in TIFF, which is the archival master.
A page you need to search. Convert, then run OCR. The conversion alone gives you a document that looks right and contains no text at all.
Examples
A three-page scan from a document feeder
The page count carries across exactly, which is the entire reason to convert rather than exporting images one at a time. Pages are placed on A4, so a scan that was already A4-shaped fills the page and one with unusual proportions gets white space around it.
A single high-resolution archive scan
Perfectly workable, but consider whether PDF is really what you want here. A single image being sent to one person is often better as a JPEG, which is smaller and previews inline in mail clients. PDF earns its place when the thing is a document rather than a picture.
Frequently asked questions
Will all the pages come through?
Yes. A multi-page TIFF becomes a PDF with the same number of pages in the same order, which is the main reason this conversion exists — converting to JPEG instead gives you only the first page, because a JPEG holds exactly one image and has nowhere to put the rest.
What page size do I get?
A4, with each scanned page scaled to fit inside it. That suits the ordinary case, since most multi-page TIFFs come from document scanners fed ordinary paper. A scan with unusual proportions — a receipt, a wide diagram — will sit inside an A4 page with white space around it rather than getting a page matched to its own shape.
Can I search the text afterwards?
No. A scan is a photograph of a page, and converting the wrapper does not read the words inside it. Making the text searchable requires optical character recognition, which is a separate step — our image-to-text tool does that part, and some scanner software can produce a searchable PDF directly.
Why is the PDF about the same size as the TIFF?
Because the page images are carried across rather than re-compressed from scratch. That is usually what you want for a document destined for records or a legal process, where quietly degrading the scan would be worse than a large file. If size is the problem, reduce the scanning resolution or compress the images before converting.
Further reading
- TIFF Was Larger Than PNG on Every Image, Including With LZWTIFF has a reputation as the professional's lossless format — the one you archive in, the one print shops ask for. PNG is treated as the web's lightweight cousin. On file size that reputation is backwards, and the gap is not small. Here is the comparison on four different kinds of image, with both common TIFF compression schemes.
- Why a Ten-Page Scan Is 40 MB and a Hundred-Page Report Is 400 KBTwo PDFs that look almost identical on screen can differ in size by a factor of a hundred, and the reason is not compression settings. One of them contains text and the other contains photographs of text. Almost every confusing thing about PDFs — why search fails, why compression barely helps, why the file is enormous — follows from which kind you have.