Plenty of systems take TIFF and nothing else: fax gateways, claims and cheque archives, court e-filing portals, and document-management software bought in 2003 that nobody is allowed to replace. Most of them want one file for the whole document rather than a folder of page images, and many want plain black and white at one bit per pixel. That is what comes out here. Pages are rendered one at a time, turned into colour, greyscale or bitonal pixels, compressed immediately with LZW, PackBits or Deflate, and chained into a single baseline TIFF with each page's resolution and number recorded in it. Page one is shown in the mode you picked, since the difference between a hard threshold and dithering is easier to see than to describe. Rendering happens on your device.
Features
One multi-page TIFF, or one TIFF per page inside a ZIP
Colour, greyscale, or black and white with a threshold you can move or error-diffusion dithering
100, 150, 200 or 300 dpi, written into every page so it prints at the right size
LZW, PackBits, Deflate or no compression — all of them lossless
Black and white is stored one bit per pixel, the way fax and archive systems expect it
Page one is previewed in the exact mode and threshold the file will use
Convert the whole document or a page range such as 1, 4-9
Each page is compressed as it is rendered, so a long document does not fill the tab with raw pixels
How to use the PDF to TIFF
Drop the PDF onto the page
Pick the colour mode — and for black and white, a threshold or dithering — then the resolution and compression
Leave the page box blank for the whole document, or list the pages you need
Convert and download the .tiff, or the ZIP with one TIFF per page
claim-form.tiff — 6 pages of 1700 × 2200 px at 1 bit per pixel, 214 KB
Bitonal at 200 dpi is what most fax and archive systems ask for.
Common errors & troubleshooting
The archive system rejected the file as not a valid TIFF. — Older software often accepts one compression only. Try PackBits, or None, and keep black and white at one bit per pixel — that combination is the most widely accepted of all.
Black-and-white pages came out blotchy, or too faint to read. — Move the threshold: lower it to keep only the darkest ink, raise it to pick up pencil and grey scanner backgrounds. For a page with a photograph on it, switch to dithering instead.
The TIFF is enormous. — Resolution is expensive — 300 dpi holds nine times the pixels of 100 dpi. Drop to 200 dpi, and choose greyscale or black and white rather than colour unless the colour carries meaning.
The text in the TIFF cannot be selected or searched. — A TIFF is a picture of the page, so its text is pixels. Keep the PDF for reading, and if the TIFF has to be searchable, convert it back and run PDF OCR on the result.
Frequently asked questions
Which TIFF compression does an archive system usually ask for?
For black-and-white documents, PackBits or a fax coding; for colour and greyscale, LZW. Deflate is usually smaller, but the oldest software sometimes cannot read it, so it is offered rather than chosen for you.
Why is a black-and-white TIFF so much smaller than the greyscale one?
It holds one bit per pixel instead of eight, and long runs of white paper pack down to almost nothing. A 200 dpi bitonal page is often 30–60 KB where the same page in greyscale is close to a megabyte.
Does the multi-page TIFF keep the order of the PDF?
Yes. Pages are written in the order you selected them, and each one records its own number and the total, so a viewer that says “page 3 of 12” gets it right.
Threshold or dithering for a page with a photograph on it?
Dithering. A single cut-off turns a photograph into black and white blobs, while error diffusion passes the difference on to neighbouring pixels, so faces and shading survive in pure black and white.
Can I convert a 400-page document?
Two hundred pages are converted at a time. Put 1-200 in the page box and then 201-400, which gives you two TIFFs — or split the document first if each part should stand on its own.
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