Turning pictures into a PDF with PDF by Zaweba
Make a PDF with a page per picture at its own resolution, every page of a multi-page TIFF or GIF, and JPEGs stored byte for byte with no loss.
Plenty of documents start life as pictures, such as photos of receipts, scanned pages, screenshots for a support ticket or a set of drawings to send as one file. Loose images are awkward to handle, and a single PDF is far easier to send, file and print than a folder of loose pictures.
PDF by Zaweba makes a PDF from pictures with care for quality. Each picture gets its own page at its own resolution, and a multi-page TIFF or GIF gives a page for every frame. JPEGs go into the PDF byte for byte, exactly as they were, and other formats are stored losslessly. It reads JPEG, PNG, TIFF, GIF, BMP, JPEG XR and ICO. JPEG 2000 is not supported.
Why byte for byte matters
Every time a JPEG is opened and saved again, it is compressed again and loses a little quality. Many converters do exactly that when they turn photos into a PDF, so the result looks slightly softer and blockier than the originals.
Putting the JPEG in byte for byte avoids that. The picture inside the PDF is the same file you started with. Nothing is recompressed, so nothing is lost, and the PDF is not much bigger than the pictures themselves. For PNG, TIFF and the other formats, lossless storage means the same idea: what goes in is what comes out.
A page per picture, at its own size
Because each picture gets a page at its own resolution, a tall phone photo and a wide screenshot each get a page that fits them, rather than being squeezed onto the same paper size with big white borders. That keeps the PDF faithful to the originals.
If you do want every page the same paper size, for printing or for a tidy pack, use Change page size afterwards. Choose whether to scale each picture to fit the new page or centre it at its true size.
Multi-page files
Some scanners save a whole document as one multi-page TIFF, and some animations are GIFs with many frames. PDF by Zaweba gives every page or frame its own PDF page, so a twelve-page scanned TIFF becomes a twelve-page PDF without any extra steps.
From folder to finished PDF
Gather the pictures in one folder and name them in the order you want, such as with a number at the start. Make the PDF, then look over the result in the Organise pages grid. Turn any page that came out sideways, delete duplicates and move pages into place.
If the pictures are scans of text and you want to search them or copy from them, remember they are still pictures at this stage. Text has to be recognised before it can be searched or exported.
Save the PDF with a clear name. If it is going by email, start from sensibly sized photos, because the pictures go in as they are and they decide how big the PDF is.
How it fits with the rest of the app
A picture PDF is a starting point. Add stamps such as Approved to receipts, put sticky notes on drawings, combine the result with other documents, or export pages again as pictures at a set resolution when someone needs them in another form.
Two habits that cost quality
Do not expect JPEG 2000 files to open. Convert them to another format first with a program that reads them.
Do not resave photos as JPEG before converting just to tidy them. Each save loses a little quality, and the point of the byte for byte route is that nothing is lost. Feed the originals in directly.
With those points in mind, turning a pile of pictures into a single, tidy document takes a minute and keeps every image exactly as sharp as it was.
