MobileSheets Forums

Full Version: Convert pdf to images won't work
You're currently viewing a stripped down version of our content. View the full version with proper formatting.
In the Companion app, I enter the path to a pdf file, but the Convert button never becomes enabled.
Actually, it defaults to a width and height of 2500, but if I clear those, then the button is live.

But no matter what pdf I specify (scanned by me or downloaded), it always says "Unable to read pdf file:"
with a colon at the end--but nothing following the colon.
Is there an error log that might indicate why it fails?

What am I missing?

Thanks,
Drag & drop a file into the window and it should work. I'll have to fix the issue with the convert button not being enabled if a path is entered manually. I also need to add the browse button back.

Thanks,
Mike
Update: I didn't get the companion app to work, but I used the tablet to convert, then copied the files back to the computer to manipulate the images.
Question on resolution: Is there a known value for a page that should work for most scores on letter-sized sheets?
The default was *very* fuzzy, with jpgs about 150KB. You may want to bump that up.
The app shows the original pdf's resolution (in some point size?) with height of 612, so I multiplied that by 10 and got hi-res jpgs at 3.5MB per page. Maybe overkill, but I figured I could knock it down later. I'm not a graphics guy and very seldom get into such things, but this was a hand-written score that needed cleanup so I just used paint.exe to do what I needed.

It all worked fine, but my new pages are still 10 times bigger than the original as I haven't found a handy tool to reduce it without losing quality.
Does anyone have any recommendations? Is it time I bought into photoshop?

Thanks!
Mike:
Thanks, DragNDrop does indeed work.
I also wasn't sure about the Settings on that window. On the tablet, it only prompts for one dimension.
Since I had a letter sized page, having both set to 2500 by default left me unsure if that would distort the aspect ratio.
Thanks again for a great app!
I definitely understand the confusion there - I actually don't allow distortion. I will honor the desired width/height as much as possible while still maintaining the original aspect ratio of each page. Based on some initial tests without reviewing the code, I believe the smaller of the two values (width and height) are used to figure out the resulting page dimension. So if you put 100x4000, it's going to use 100 as the width and figure out the largest height possible at that width while still maintaining the page aspect ratio. I think on the tablet I decided it didn't make sense to ask for both if I was just going to clamp to the smaller value. I'll have to update the companion to behave the same way.

Mike
Quick note: there is actually a label stating "You can drag & drop the pdf on this dialog" as well as a button for browsing, but I somehow hit some buttons on the keyboard while editing that dialog and it resulted in the label and button being hidden. Whoops! It will be fixed in the next update.

Thanks,
Mike
(05-17-2016, 09:39 AM)starmusic Wrote: [ -> ]Mike:
Thanks, DragNDrop does indeed work.
I also wasn't sure about the Settings on that window. On the tablet, it only prompts for one dimension.
Since I had a letter sized page, having both set to 2500 by default left me unsure if that would distort the aspect ratio.
Thanks again for a great app!

Mike:
This ended up working out really well!
I had put my 3 pages of big jpgs into pdf form (12mb pdf), and then used THAT pdf to test the Companion's Convert to JPG utility, with your default 2500 settings, and got beautiful, clean jpgs
that were just as detailed but also much cleaner--the process removed a lot of "noise" artifacts from the pages. 
And of course they were a fourth the size at a meg each!

Thanks again and again,
Excellent! I'm happy I could help.