My tax office requires all attachments to be in PDF format. I now have various image files in PNG format which I want to convert.
The challenge: The resulting PDFs should have exactly the same dimensions as the source files. Normally PDF printing/converting offers to select a page size, e.g. A4 or letter, and an option to resize the image to the page size. I want the opposite, I want the page size to resize to the image size. A 600x400px image should result in a 600x400px PDF when displayed at 100% in a PDF viewer.
More challenges: Using only tools that are already installed. I'm using BW64 10.0.6 , so often recommended convert or img2pdf are out of the race. Command line tools, if possible.
It's more difficult than I expected.
So far I had success with Abiword and CUPS printing, but the process is tedious and involves defining a page layout or a custom size exactly as large as the image.
Something that works great is inkscape. Not installed but I have an AppImage saved outside of the main sfs and a symlink to this AppImage in my PATH. The command inkscape --export-type="pdf" my_file.png will create a file my_file.png.pdf , with exactly the same dimension. It's also the only tool I know that would convert SVG to PDF.
Finally I tried PeasyPDF, which has a long history in Puppy but hasn't been maintained since its last version 4.2.(here the download page)
@radky has made some changes to the code so that it runs in BW64. For my purposes the "Convert" tool looks promising, however the code contains a syntax error and happily produces an empty PDF file when choosing a "Custom" page size. Did this ever work?
Let's fix it:
Find the lines
Code: Select all
INWIDTH=$(dc $PIXWIDTH $CUSTOMDPI / p) #inches
INHEIGHT=$(dc $PIXHEIGHT $CUSTOMDPI / p)and change to
Code: Select all
INWIDTH=$(dc -e"2k $PIXWIDTH $CUSTOMDPI / p")
INHEIGHT=$(dc -e"2k $PIXHEIGHT $CUSTOMDPI / p")In order to create a PDF with same size on screen as the image the dpi value for "Custom" needs to be changed.
Let's set "Custom" to 96dpi, the de-facto standard in all Puppies
and "Custom+" to 48dpi, increasing size to 200% of original
and "Custom-" to 192dpi, decreasing size to 50% of original:
Code: Select all
if [ "$PAGESIZE" = "$(gettext 'Custom')" ]; then
CUSTOMDPI=96;
elif [ "$PAGESIZE" = "$(gettext 'Custom+')" ]; then
CUSTOMDPI=48;
elif [ "$PAGESIZE" = "$(gettext 'Custom-')" ]; then
CUSTOMDPI=192;
else
CUSTOMMODE="no"
fiBW64 defaults to gtkdialog compiled forGTK3. If the drop down list doesn't work, the original gtkdialog3 in the last line needs to be changed to gtk2dialog.
That's all to achieve my goal. Making PeasyPDF more flexible and user friendly is another goal, but I leave this for a rainy day.
?