problems with "convert" & Windows can't view output images

[farmer]

Hi,

I'm using IM 6.4.7-Q16 on Windows Vista. Starting with file.tif which identify shows to have 300x300 resolution, I do

convert -density 300x300 file.tif file.pdf

and then either

(a) convert file.pdf file2.tiff

or

(b) convert -density 300x300 file.pdf file2.tiff

The file.pdf is fine.
In case (a) the output has the original page images squashed into the bottom left corner of the page (about 1/4 of the x-size and 1/4 of the y-size; maybe 72/300).
In case (b) I haven't successfully seen convert finish. It just runs for a long time, and my free hard disk space gradually decreases as it does. The original file.tif and the file.pdf are both < 2MB, but I've watched my hard disk space drop by a few Gig during one run of convert. Anyone know what's going on?

A second issue: this is part of a script that deals with various input image files, in which I need to produce tiffs readable by Microsoft Office Document Imaging (MODI). For some reason if I convert directly, for instance:

jpg -> tiff

with convert, the output is not readable by MODI, and looks garbled in the Vista image viewer - however, I tried uploading one to Google pages, and it looked fine there. But

jpg -> pdf -> tiff

works - the output tiff is fine. Likewise, I thought I might have some input tiffs that MODI can't read, in which case the

tiff -> pdf -> tiff

should provide a readable one. That's why I'm doing the conversions above. Any better suggestions on how to get Windows programs to read the TIFFs?

Thanks,
Farmer.

[magick]

Many TIFF viewers only support a subset of the TIFF specification. Perhaps the Vista viewer cannot grok JPEG-compress TIFF images. Try this instead:

• convert image.jpg -compress zip image.tif
  convert image.jpg -compress none image.tif

[farmer]

Hi, thanks for the reply. It seems that the "type" attribute is the issue. Setting the type to true color, the Windows image viewer shows the image correctly; any other type doesn't work.

I realise I probably posted this message in the wrong forum; I was actually intending on posting it in "Users". Sorry about that.