2007.10.04 18:47 "[Tiff] Pink pages with tiff2pdf -j", by Chris Gentle

Hi. I hope someone can help me out. I have been trying to scan a bunch of old paperwork and convert this stuff to PDF. Basically I've been scanning individual pages into *.tif files and converting them to PDF as follows:

tiffcp *.tif /tmp/zzz.tif
tiff2pdf -j /tmp/zzz.tif > zzz.pdf

Quite pleased with the results, I scanned happily for several months, carefully checking the results of each pdf file with kpdf under KDE and then throwing away the original papers.

Then, one day after a Gentoo Linux update my PDF files suddenly started showing up pink. It looked like there was a translucent pink layer across the top of each page. I soon found that KPDF had been updated.

To my surprise, I found that all of the scans I had been working on for so long all appeared to be pink in Acroread, ghostscript, gimp, etc. I even tried converting my PDF files to other formats with ImageMagick but the results were still pink.

I downgraded back to KPDF 3.5.5 and it still displays the images properly. I feel like this is a bug in the tiff2pdf code and that kpdf suffered from the same bug and displayed the PDF files correctly.

I'm hoping someone who knows about the internals of this stuff can tell me how I can salvage all of the scans that I've converted to PDF. If KPDF 3.5.5 can display the images properly then the data I need is still in those PDF files, I just need to turn off that pink layer.

Here's an example of the pink page, converted to .jpg due to size:

        http://home.hiwaay.net/~gentlec/pink.jpg

Any help would be appreciated. I'd also like to know whether anyone can reproduce this with tiff2pdf -j. I'm currently using tiff-3.8.2.

Thanks.

--
Chris