Converting pdf to tif (tiff) images

One of the things I was looking into this morning was the possiblity of converting a pdf into a tiff image. Many character recognition programs (and some music recognition software) uses tiff as one of the formats that it can recognize from. I have a number of things in PDF format that I wanted to test out by converting to tif. There MUST be a way..... yes there is (several I suppose).. In linux though the answer is ghostscript.

Here's the simplest example that I've come up with....

gs -sDEVICE=tiffg4 -sOutputFile=file.tif file.pdf

*(you might run gs -h to find what Device's are supported by your install of ghostscript.) In this case it created a tif image from the file.pdf source. Very simple (and -dBATCH could be added for use in a script.))

Of course, that was the simplest example directly calling ghostscript. Try this out with convert (which uses ghostscript.)

convert file.pdf file.tif

Done....