Best way to convert pdf files to tiff files

Use Imagemagick, or better yet, Ghostscript.

http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/library/l-graf2/#N101C2 has an example for imagemagick:

convert foo.pdf pages-%03d.tiff

http://www.asmail.be/msg0055376363.html has an example for ghostscript:

gs -q -dNOPAUSE -sDEVICE=tiffg4 -sOutputFile=a.tif foo.pdf -c quit

I would install ghostscript and read the man page for gs to see what exact options are needed and experiment.

Using GhostScript from the command line, I've used the following in the past:

on Windows:

gswin32c -dNOPAUSE -q -g300x300 -sDEVICE=tiffg4 -dBATCH -sOutputFile=output_file_name.tif input_file_name.pdf

on *nix:

gs -dNOPAUSE -q -g300x300 -sDEVICE=tiffg4 -dBATCH -sOutputFile=output_file_name.tif input_file_name.pdf

For a large number of files, a simple batch/shell script could be used to convert an arbitrary number of files...

I wrote a little powershell script to go through a directory structure and convert all pdf files to tiff files using ghostscript. Here is my script:

$tool = 'C:\Program Files\gs\gs8.63\bin\gswin32c.exe'
$pdfs = get-childitem . -recurse | where {$_.Extension -match "pdf"}

foreach($pdf in $pdfs)
{

    $tiff = $pdf.FullName.split('.')[0] + '.tiff'
    if(test-path $tiff)
    {
        "tiff file already exists " + $tiff
    }
    else        
    {   
        'Processing ' + $pdf.Name        
        $param = "-sOutputFile=$tiff"
        & $tool -q -dNOPAUSE -sDEVICE=tiffg4 $param -r300 $pdf.FullName -c quit
    }
}

using python this is what I ended up with

import os
os.popen(' '.join([
                   self._ghostscriptPath + 'gswin32c.exe', 
                   '-q',
                   '-dNOPAUSE',
                   '-dBATCH',
                   '-r300',
                   '-sDEVICE=tiff12nc',
                   '-sPAPERSIZE=a4',
                   '-sOutputFile=%s %s' % (tifDest, pdfSource),
                   ]))

How about pdf2tiff? http://python.net/~gherman/pdf2tiff.html

ABCPDF can do so as well -- check out http://www.websupergoo.com/helppdf6net/default.html

https://pypi.org/project/pdf2tiff/

You could also use pdf2ps, ps2image and then convert from the resulting image to tiff with other utilities (I remember 'paul' [paul - Yet another image viewer (displays PNG, TIFF, GIF, JPG, etc.])

Disclaimer: work for product I am recommending

Atalasoft has a .NET library that can convert PDF to TIFF -- we are a partner of FOXIT, so the PDF rendering is very good.

I like PDFTIFF.com to convert PDF to TIFF, it can handle unlimited pages