Re: [Gimp-user] Free software for Batch file conversion

[Steve Kinney <admin pilobilus net>]

On 05/25/2018 10:57 AM, baskaran rajaram via gimp-user-list wrote:
> Dear,
> I want to convert batch of more than 500 . jpg,. png files into a single. pdf file. How shall I do using 
> GIMP installation., Shall you pls explain in steps.
>
> Will the. Pdf be OCR enabled, password protected for character searching. Hope there won't be necessary for 
> uploading raw file for convertion. 
>
> If not what other free software will do for my task.

On any (? probably so) operating system you have, Scribus will do the
job.  Open a new document, select a template with your desired page size
and etc., and start adding image frames, importing images to them, and
(probably) adjusting the frame to image size (right click for options).
Save the file (for re-use, adjustments, etc. as needed, then export it
as PDF with your desired options per the menu that comes up.

If you need to add page numbers, captions, or other text Scribus will
probably be the way to go.

https://wiki.scribus.net/canvas/Download

A Scribus tutorial:

https://wiki.scribus.net/canvas/Get_Started_With_Scribus:4

Or if you are using an operating system that supports it, and your
images are whole pages, imagemagick might do the trick way more simply
and quickly.  On Linux I have used it to convert scanned pages to PDF.
The images will appear as pages in alphabetical order, so add 01, 02,
etc to the front of their names if needed.  Then...

1.  Examine the images, determine a good target width for all of them.

2.  Edit images if/as required.

3.  If necessary equalize image widths via:  mogrify -resize [pixels] *.jpg

*NOTE* Assure that all images have the same DPI value, use "mogrify
-density [DPI] *.jpg" (or png, etc.) if required.

4.  To convert all images in a directory to one pdf file, do:

convert *.jpg [output].pdf

With a large number of pages, the process tends to hang.  In that case,
this script has done the trick for me.  Copy and save the text below as
a plain text file, put it in your home directory's /bin folder and set
it as executable (chmod +x [script-name.scr]).  Then put the images in
one directory (anywhere), open a terminal there and type the name of
your script to run it against your images:

#!/bin/sh
# convert large number of .jpg files to one PDF file.  Equalize widths
of .jpg files first via: mogrify -resize [pixels] *.jpg

for f in *.jpg;
do
convert "$f" "${f%.jpg}.pdf"
done
pdftk *.pdf cat output combined.pdf/