pictures2pdf

Convert photographs of pages of a document into one PDF document

Huub de Beer
2008

I constructed this program during my historical research on the Dutch Computer Pionieers when I often found myself in archives where photocopying documents, if accepted at all, was an expensive hassle. Fortunately, it is almost always allowed to take pictures with a digital photocamera. As a result I collected a lot of pictures and I wanted printable documents instead.

So I started searching on the internet for a solution of my problem. The only thing I found was a bash script using ImageMagick created by by Corey Satten. (See also his site about his program) First I adapted the script to my needs and later I wrote a ruby program to ease working with the script. Finally I had the idea to create a C++/Qt version of the program, but that didn't work out very well due to time constraints.

Requirements for pictures2pdf are Ruby, LaTeX and ImageMagick. Download a zip file containing the program and helper files of picture2pdf. Installation is easy: put it somewhere on your filesystem and create a symlink to the pictures2pdf.sh script in your bin folder. Usage: see below.

    NAME
      pictures2pdf - create a photocopy like pdf of photographed
                     pictures of a document

    SYNOPSIS
      pictures2pdf [ options ] pictures

    DESCRIPTION
      pictures2pdf uses ImageMagick to transform pictures into
      photocopy like copies. The transformation used is a very
      slightly adapted version of a bash script using
      ImageMagick created by by Corey Satten,  see
      http://corey.elsewhere.org/camscan/ and
      http://corey.elsewhere.org/camscan/scancvt.
      All praise to Satten :-)

      The output of pictures2pdf can be changed by giving some
      options:

      -o, --output filename
         The filename of the output pdf document.
         The default is 'output.pdf'.

      -h, --help
         Print this help.

      pictures
        Pictures are specified either by giving the filenames of
        the pictures separated by spaces. Another option is to
        specify a range of pictures by: 'start_picture.pic to
        end_picture.pic'. With 'pic' the proper extension.

        Where start_picture.pic denotes the start of the range and
        end_picture.pic the end of the range. Path and extension
        are stripped and the set containing all successive
        strings  between the start string and the end string is
        generated and transformed into a list of filenames.

        pictures2pdf does not check if these filenames represent
        existing files or pictures. So be sure all files in the
        range does exist before using a range.

    EXAMPLES
      pictures2pdf -o menu.pdf menu001.jpg to menu006.jpg:

        Creates the pdf file menu.pdf containing the pictures
        menu001.jpg, menu002.jpg, menu003.jpg, menu004.jpg,
        menu005.jpg, and menu006.jpg.

      pictures2pdf -o "doc 2.pdf" pic0.png pic4.png pic12.png to
      pic15.png:

        Creates the pdf file "doc 2.pdf" containing the pictures of
        pic0.png, pic4.png, pic12.png, pic13.png, and pic15.png.

    VERSION
      Version 0.

    AUTHOR
      HT de Beer