Converting JPEG to PDF

Your scanner produced a bunch of JPEG files but the government forms or your printing company require PDF. Converting from JPEG to PDF is a common task but there are a few important details you need to know in order to achieve the best results.

The JPEG Format

Most probably you are familiar with the JPEG format since it is one of the most commonly used image formats today. It is widely accessible since all operating systems can access JPEG files, plus all modern image editing software recognizes the JPEG format.

The JPEG format offers good quality and also when it comes to file compression it can do pretty good although the compressed images would have lower quality than the non-compressed ones. Compression also affects file size, the better the compression, the smaller the file size. However, this comes at a price of reduced image quality.

Why PDF?

One would ask, why would they want to convert JPEG to PDF if the JPEG is so widely used and if it offers good image quality. There are a couple of good reasons why one would consider such conversion which if course depends on the usage of the image files.

JPEG cannot contain multiple pages. This makes the PDF format a great solution for organizing your files. You can keep pages that belong to a single document in one file, making it easy to send by email or store on your computer.

There are also scanners that do not scan to PDF format but only to JPEG and other image formats, or scanners that cannot do multi-page scans. If, for example, you need to scan a multi-page report and you save all pages into JPEG format you will end up with a JPEG file for each page. If your report is 50 or 100 pages you may have a hard time working with the report or distributing it amongst colleagues. The easiest and most convenient thing to do would be to convert the report from many JPEG files to one single PDF document that contains all the pages.

PDFs are Searchable – Enter OCR

When you scan a paper document what you get is a photograph of the text. It can not be searched in nor can it be indexed. OCR (Optical character Recognition) is an advanced computer technology designed to solve this problem. If your conversion software supports OCR it will recognize each character by its shape. Next, the software will create a PDF using another great feature of the PDF format – PDFs can have both an image and a text layer.

Thus the image layer will contain the original image and the text layer will contain all the extracted text. It is now easy for you to search in the file, copy any text out of it or look for a document containing some text on your computer. Convenient, right?