JPG to PDF

AdamZ

AdamZ

Touchdown! Greaser!
Joined
Feb 24, 2005
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Montgomery County PA
Display Name
Display name:
Adam Zucker
I have a logo that was sent to me in jpg and I need to convert it to a PDF for my printer. Is there an easy but quality way to do this?
 
On a mac choose print and then click save as PDF.
 
Cluemeister said:
On a mac choose print and then click save as PDF.
Click to expand...

This can be done on a PC too - just "print" to a PDF instead of a printer. You'll do this in the window where you make all of your selections (pages, qty, etc.) before printing.
 
Guys you are making this too simple...
  • First, buy a photo printer and some photo paper.
  • Print the JPG on the photo paper.
  • Take a picture with your phone of the photo on the photo paper.
  • Email it to yourself.
  • Open your email.
  • Save the JPG on your desktop (preferably next to the one you printed on the photo paper)
  • Compare the two
  • Does the one you took a picture of have your thumb in the photo? No? Then use that one.
  • Then do one of the suggestions above

See? That's much more "POA"-ish. :)
 
Actually, a phone is a good scanner. I use it to "save" any piece of paper that I can't take with me or think I might lose.
 
tinerj said:
Actually, a phone is a good scanner. I use it to "save" any piece of paper that I can't take with me or think I might lose.
Click to expand...

I have all my important pilot and aircraft documents scanned and in "Photos" libraries that sync to my iPhone and iPad. Whether or not digital images can legally substitute for originals, I like having them available. It would be a godsend if I ever do lose my wallet or misplace a document.

Simply laying out the docs and taking a photo would be a quick and dirty method of accomplishing the same thing.
 
workaround.png
 
MacOSX, Linux and Windows10 all have native print-to-PDF functionality. Windows7 and below is where you need to jump through hoops.
 
Since you brought up quality, I'll complicate things by saying both JPG and PDF are not the best way to do "Logos". Because of the compression in JPG, it's possible that you will lose sharpness. And, it won't scale up or down without losing quality. And it doesn't have the ability to have a transparent background. Logos are best done in PNG, AI, EPS, or other vector format. .... 'just sayin'
 
CT4ME said:
Since you brought up quality, I'll complicate things by saying both JPG and PDF are not the best way to do "Logos". Because of the compression in JPG, it's possible that you will lose sharpness. And, it won't scale up or down without losing quality. And it doesn't have the ability to have a transparent background. Logos are best done in PNG, AI, EPS, or other vector format. .... 'just sayin'
Click to expand...

Don't forget BMP's...those are AWESOME for logos :p
 
And even GIF, but neither scales. So if it's not perfectly sized to begin with, it will lose quality when resized.
 
CT4ME said:
Since you brought up quality, I'll complicate things by saying both JPG and PDF are not the best way to do "Logos". Because of the compression in JPG, it's possible that you will lose sharpness. And, it won't scale up or down without losing quality. And it doesn't have the ability to have a transparent background. Logos are best done in PNG, AI, EPS, or other vector format. .... 'just sayin'
Click to expand...

That's what I thought but our print house that does all our business stuff says they need it in pdf.
 
CT4ME said:
Since you brought up quality, I'll complicate things by saying both JPG and PDF are not the best way to do "Logos". Because of the compression in JPG, it's possible that you will lose sharpness. And, it won't scale up or down without losing quality. And it doesn't have the ability to have a transparent background. Logos are best done in PNG, AI, EPS, or other vector format. .... 'just sayin'
Click to expand...
But if you take vector to PDF, it's generally better than Jpeg to PDF.
 
File.
Print
Save as PDF.

assuming you have a mac. . .
 
GeorgeC said:
workaround.png
Click to expand...

This. So this.

We had a staff member ask this vague question today of two of us standing in front of a computer with Acrobat Pro DC on it.

"Is there an easier way to do this?"

"Do what?" (Because you know, we weren't there doing something completely unrelated and we're clairvoyant so we know what she's working on magically.)

"Let me show you. To look at all these files at once I drag them from here to here and then it opens all these tabs."

(She was dragging PDF files from the filesystem to Acrobat and dropping them. It was opening them in tabs like it should.)

"Uhhh. What do you mean by easier?"

"Well if I could see them all on one page that'd be great. The tabs are annoying."

"Are they all being merged into one document?"

"Eventually."

Other admin sits down and shows her the Combine function. Drags and drops all of them into it.

Then I explain that will start the process of combining them but won't really save anything until you click save and name the new file.

She's overjoyed. "This also fixes another problem. Since it makes a new name you don't damage the original files if you make changes!"

Ummmm. Yup. There ya go. Killed two birds with one stone. I can think of about ten other ways to avoid that though.

"You don't know how much easier this will make my write up to the other ten people on how to do this!"

Smile. Nod. Killed three birds. And saved ten people from irreparable harm. Who knew she was going to train ten other people?

IT heroes once again, just by clicking ...

File->Combine.

Hahaha.

Might as well enjoy it. They're usually complaining about us. :)

I don't want to think what that training document looked like. Or the pain and suffering it would have caused ten other humans. I hope
she deletes it. :(

Went back to doing our other stuff prepping the machines for the ten new employees...
 
One warning about Print-to-PDF. Many OSs (glaring at Mac OS X here...) create uncompressed PDFs in that process... so the file size becomes enormous for no good reason.

Often after doing the Print to PDF thing, you can open the resulting PDF in something actually made to handle PDFs and save it again with compression and it'll be no noticeable loss of quality and magnitudes smaller.

I ran into this when converting some crap on my Mac and then emailing the resulting files to someone for a project. The file attachments in the emails were insanely large for documents that were only a page or three long. Big documents the file size started hitting their mail server's ridiculously small limit for attachment sizes.

So we started digging. And found out Apple doesn't compress the PDF properly. Not even close.

Then we played with other OSs. None of the Print to PDF functions from anything other than Adobe products and a few others who handle PDFs (properly) made small file sizes or used compression at all.

As an aside. PDF compression is generally lossless. It's not compression like Zip or similar. It's how the raw file format itself is handled. May even be a patent/locked down tech sort of thing. I say that from seeing that most open source PDF libraries don't do it. So it's an assumption. I didn't care to dig any further once we figured out that Adobe's stuff would do it and we were just fixing our immediate problem... the email attachment size.
 
denverpilot said:
One warning about Print-to-PDF. Many OSs (glaring at Mac OS X here...) create uncompressed PDFs in that process... so the file size becomes enormous for no good reason.

Often after doing the Print to PDF thing, you can open the resulting PDF in something actually made to handle PDFs and save it again with compression and it'll be no noticeable loss of quality and magnitudes smaller.

I ran into this when converting some crap on my Mac and then emailing the resulting files to someone for a project. The file attachments in the emails were insanely large for documents that were only a page or three long. Big documents the file size started hitting their mail server's ridiculously small limit for attachment sizes.

So we started digging. And found out Apple doesn't compress the PDF properly. Not even close.

Then we played with other OSs. None of the Print to PDF functions from anything other than Adobe products and a few others who handle PDFs (properly) made small file sizes or used compression at all.

As an aside. PDF compression is generally lossless. It's not compression like Zip or similar. It's how the raw file format itself is handled. May even be a patent/locked down tech sort of thing. I say that from seeing that most open source PDF libraries don't do it. So it's an assumption. I didn't care to dig any further once we figured out that Adobe's stuff would do it and we were just fixing our immediate problem... the email attachment size.
Click to expand...
I've seen that even within Acrobat with scanned PDFs. I'll often get some huge PDF from a scan or some other person and see it shrink substantially if I use Pro's reduce file size function.

I haven't seen the problem you have with other products, though. In fact I don't use Adobe's "printer" because, at least in the past, I found it produced a larger file than other converters.
 
PDF can preserve layers and so, print shops will use that format. Often each color is saved as a layer. I think they are probably looking for the source art, which a jpeg is not. Vector art is best, like an EPS, as mentioned above. If you are doing something like a vinyl sign, the colors need to be separated. Also, with screen printing.
 
John221us said:
PDF can preserve layers and so, print shops will use that format. Often each color is saved as a layer. I think they are probably looking for the source art, which a jpeg is not. Vector art is best, like an EPS, as mentioned above. If you are doing something like a vinyl sign, the colors need to be separated. Also, with screen printing.
Click to expand...

Our print shop doesn't care hardly at all anymore what format things come in as. They (by far) get mostly PDFs but the software on the custom print servers handles converting the stuff to whatever the printers need anymore.

At least in the Xerox and Oce' worlds... the big stuff.

The Commercial printers nowadays for the most part, come with a dedicated PC running a custom version of Linux and the manufacturer's software, and to print stuff they literally just drag and drop stuff to these servers and walk over to the printer, and hit "accept job" anymore. (Technically they can also hit the accept button at their desk, but most walk over and make sure the screen on the printer jives with the job setup they preset on the software on the server.)

The Oce' is a monster. Uses rolls of paper they load onto one end with a forklift and runs the entire length of the warehouse. Prints all sorts of ways, all a giant laser printer that knows from end to end how fast to roll the paper through as to not get ahead of the paper cutter and stacker at a the end of the paper line. Pretty amazing stuff. We take overflow business from a number of online newspaper / newsletter print shops when they can't handle a high volume run. Niche market. Only these monster roll printers can do it, unless you happen to have an old newspaper press lying around.

The big guy is a bit picky... they have techs out about every two weeks to tweak the thing because the printing is coming out maybe 0.2mm off for one color, or similar little quirks. Page cutters missing by a human hair on page runs in the tens of thousands. Stuff like that.

It obviously comes with nearly dedicated tech support (same couple of guys, same company van most of the time) for the price.

He forced software upgrade on the thing was negotiated DOWN to $20K by us last year. None of the new features were needed, a couple were wanted, but not for the original quote of almost $40,000.

And we laughed when they said we had to buy the bog standard HP DL series server to run their software on it, or our server would have to go to some guy they kept telling us was a PhD to "certify" any other type of server used and the certification cost $10,000.

Again, it's running Linux... SuSe based as I recall. That dude has the easiest gig ever. For better or worse, we're a Dell shop and adding an HP to the mix in the rack was just dumb. But we couldn't get past their silliness on "certification" so...

At least we told them to pound sand and send us the specs and we'd buy the HP server on our own and load it.

They blinked and didn't charge us $15,000 in hardware for a $4000 server but they said no dice on loading the CD ourselves... LOL... we gave up and let them load the CD and charge $2000 to do that. Silly printing business. Still saved us $9,000 by not just buying their stuff they just rebranded and tossed in a company logo box. They even tried to pawn off old warehouse stock and were a generation behind in the HP server world. Nope. Not buying your overstock.

Did I mention the tech set up the hardware RAID 1 wrong? LOL.

Yeah... We caught that and made them come back out, back it up, and fix it, and restore the data back into it. And do it for free.

So I guess it was two $1000 service calls to load the OS twice. :)

The print business is strange.

We had a rather large and expensive Xerox for the office (not the print shop) crap out and blow a power supply a week after it was installed two weeks ago. The tech came and the thing fried three USB sticks he attempted to reload the software from. Like dead. Fried. Impressive.

They tried to blame it on a power surge. We pulled the logs and data logging data from the UPS' feeding the critical gear and told them, nope.

Ship another one. And get a loaner over here like, yesterday.

The new one arrived a couple days ago. That took two weeks. The loaner is still onsite in case this one dies. It stays for another week at least. That thing prints tens of thousands of pages a month and is also a busy double sided sheet feed scanner that dumps the files directly into its own spot on the local multi terabyte NAS.

Must say though, the current Xerox stuff is really solid. Quite a bit cheaper than HP or some of the other big office printer players, too.
 
asicer said:
MacOSX, Linux and Windows10 all have native print-to-PDF functionality. Windows7 and below is where you need to jump through hoops.
Click to expand...
In Win7 you install a pdf printer. "cute pdf" was my favorite one.
 
denverpilot said:
Our print shop doesn't care hardly at all anymore what format things come in as. They (by far) get mostly PDFs but the software on the custom print servers handles converting the stuff to whatever the printers need anymore.

At least in the Xerox and Oce' worlds... the big stuff.

The Commercial printers nowadays for the most part, come with a dedicated PC running a custom version of Linux and the manufacturer's software, and to print stuff they literally just drag and drop stuff to these servers and walk over to the printer, and hit "accept job" anymore. (Technically they can also hit the accept button at their desk, but most walk over and make sure the screen on the printer jives with the job setup they preset on the software on the server.)

The Oce' is a monster. Uses rolls of paper they load onto one end with a forklift and runs the entire length of the warehouse. Prints all sorts of ways, all a giant laser printer that knows from end to end how fast to roll the paper through as to not get ahead of the paper cutter and stacker at a the end of the paper line. Pretty amazing stuff. We take overflow business from a number of online newspaper / newsletter print shops when they can't handle a high volume run. Niche market. Only these monster roll printers can do it, unless you happen to have an old newspaper press lying around.

The big guy is a bit picky... they have techs out about every two weeks to tweak the thing because the printing is coming out maybe 0.2mm off for one color, or similar little quirks. Page cutters missing by a human hair on page runs in the tens of thousands. Stuff like that.

It obviously comes with nearly dedicated tech support (same couple of guys, same company van most of the time) for the price.

He forced software upgrade on the thing was negotiated DOWN to $20K by us last year. None of the new features were needed, a couple were wanted, but not for the original quote of almost $40,000.

And we laughed when they said we had to buy the bog standard HP DL series server to run their software on it, or our server would have to go to some guy they kept telling us was a PhD to "certify" any other type of server used and the certification cost $10,000.

Again, it's running Linux... SuSe based as I recall. That dude has the easiest gig ever. For better or worse, we're a Dell shop and adding an HP to the mix in the rack was just dumb. But we couldn't get past their silliness on "certification" so...

At least we told them to pound sand and send us the specs and we'd buy the HP server on our own and load it.

They blinked and didn't charge us $15,000 in hardware for a $4000 server but they said no dice on loading the CD ourselves... LOL... we gave up and let them load the CD and charge $2000 to do that. Silly printing business. Still saved us $9,000 by not just buying their stuff they just rebranded and tossed in a company logo box. They even tried to pawn off old warehouse stock and were a generation behind in the HP server world. Nope. Not buying your overstock.

Did I mention the tech set up the hardware RAID 1 wrong? LOL.

Yeah... We caught that and made them come back out, back it up, and fix it, and restore the data back into it. And do it for free.

So I guess it was two $1000 service calls to load the OS twice. :)

The print business is strange.

We had a rather large and expensive Xerox for the office (not the print shop) crap out and blow a power supply a week after it was installed two weeks ago. The tech came and the thing fried three USB sticks he attempted to reload the software from. Like dead. Fried. Impressive.

They tried to blame it on a power surge. We pulled the logs and data logging data from the UPS' feeding the critical gear and told them, nope.

Ship another one. And get a loaner over here like, yesterday.

The new one arrived a couple days ago. That took two weeks. The loaner is still onsite in case this one dies. It stays for another week at least. That thing prints tens of thousands of pages a month and is also a busy double sided sheet feed scanner that dumps the files directly into its own spot on the local multi terabyte NAS.

Must say though, the current Xerox stuff is really solid. Quite a bit cheaper than HP or some of the other big office printer players, too.
Click to expand...

My point was, that some print processes, such as vinyl signs and screenprint (t-shirts) require color separation information. There are only a few formats that support that, PDF being the most popular for print shops. They should not care for digital printing, but you are probably dealing with $10 an hour employees who were trained how to follow one set of directions.
 
Last edited:
John221us said:
My point was, that some print processes, such as vinyl signs and screenprint (t-shirts) require color separation information. There are only a few formats that support that, PDF being the most popular for print shops. They should not care for digital printing, but you are probably dealing with $10 an hour employees who were trained how to follow one set of directions.
Click to expand...

Yeah, and I was saying it would be unlikely that the vinyl sign shops or t-shirt places care at all about the file format much anymore if they're using modern gear. The newer gear can split the colors even from a file format that doesn't technically support color layers, for them.

If they're using out of date older gear, yes. They'll have to get specific file formats or they'll have someone on staff messing with conversions, but the latest software for those machines just handles it now.

It ain't cheap stuff, but any print shop (paper, vinyl, or silkscreen) that's doing any serious volume has the newer stuff usually.

AFAIK we pay better than $10, but I'm not privy to the print shop's salary numbers. They sure do like huge jobs that have some OT for everyone in them, though.

Plus, they play classic rock back there in the warehouse, and the warehouse is always ten to fifteen degrees cooler than my office. So I like going back there to see what's up, or drag my laptop back there when I'm working a project and need to be "hard" to find. :)
 
denverpilot said:
Yeah, and I was saying it would be unlikely that the vinyl sign shops or t-shirt places care at all about the file format much anymore if they're using modern gear. The newer gear can split the colors even from a file format that doesn't technically support color layers, for them.

If they're using out of date older gear, yes. They'll have to get specific file formats or they'll have someone on staff messing with conversions, but the latest software for those machines just handles it now.

It ain't cheap stuff, but any print shop (paper, vinyl, or silkscreen) that's doing any serious volume has the newer stuff usually.

AFAIK we pay better than $10, but I'm not privy to the print shop's salary numbers. They sure do like huge jobs that have some OT for everyone in them, though.

Plus, they play classic rock back there in the warehouse, and the warehouse is always ten to fifteen degrees cooler than my office. So I like going back there to see what's up, or drag my laptop back there when I'm working a project and need to be "hard" to find. :)
Click to expand...

I am actually involved a bit in this industry, as my GF has an art studio/wine bar/restaurant and we do t-shirts and vinyl. I am on another forum for this stuff. I can assure you most color separation is still done manually. If you outsource imaging, such as plastisol transfers, screen printing or vinyl signs, they will want color separated art. They will charge extra to perform that service. You are lucky to have found a shop that comps it. I have never heard of that before.
 
John221us said:
I am actually involved a bit in this industry, as my GF has an art studio/wine bar/restaurant and we do t-shirts and vinyl. I am on another forum for this stuff. I can assure you most color separation is still done manually. If you outsource imaging, such as plastisol transfers, screen printing or vinyl signs, they will want color separated art. They will charge extra to perform that service. You are lucky to have found a shop that comps it. I have never heard of that before.
Click to expand...

I have no idea if we comp it, we just have gear that does it for "us". I'm just the IT guy who set up their servers for them, but they don't care anymore about file formats... their Xerox and Oce' servers just convert instantly to whatever the printers need. It's literally drag-and-drop for them. If they charge for it, awesome, because it doesn't require more than three seconds to do it anymore. Haha.
 
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