First time .PDF to .TIF

[qabulin]

Our office performs large format work (24"x36" and 30"x42") which are all architectural drawings for construction projects. The printing company I have to use at the moment prefers TIFF format and charges a lot to convert my PDFs. I can perform this easily with Adobe Standard, but our office is moving to take a more open-source approach to most of our software. In spite of this, I still have to work with PDFs for our records and TIFFs for the printing office's equipment.

So here is what I'm trying to do...

I need to convert a PDF to a TIFF, compressed, not blurry, no transparency, black and white and I have gleaned the web for the following command and options (using Linux operating system):

convert drawing.pdf -compress lzw -density 300 -background white -flatten -type truecolor -type bilevel drawing.tif

The end result is so inferior to proprietary software that the print turns out VERY pixelated and almost illegible.

Can some please stear me in the right direction? It looks to me that I'm just slinging commands around with little competence of what I'm doing to this poor defenseless TIFF file.

I also would like an option for an output in grayscale versus the black and white. Grayscale is our typical output, but this one particular job just happens to be black and white.

Thanks for the input!!

^_^

[fmw42]

try

convert -density 300 image.pdf -depth 8 -type grayscale image.tif