The built-in PDF converter is now the default method for converting PDF files to TIF. This renderer handles both portrait and landscape pages and converts to TIF without using the Document Converter print driver. It is usually faster than either Acrobat or Ghostscript and has more options for rendering documents with images and halftones to produce smaller output TIF files.
The built-in PDF converter consists of two elements: each PDF page is first rendered to a color bitmap and then reduced to monochrome for faxing using a standard dithering method. Most of the $image_options keywords affect the second part of the processing, which is also used for HTML documents and for image files. Both parts of the built-in PDF converter are also used for converting Microsoft Office documents, by converting first to PDF and then to TIF. This method is used when automating both Microsoft Office and LibreOffice.
This conversion method is recommended only for documents of letter, legal, A4 or B4 width (or height, for landscape pages). Other widths will either be truncated (if larger) or scaled depending on the SCALED option.
The default built-in PDF converter for the FFEXTERN document converter is PDFium, Google's renderer developed for the Chrome Browser. This is implemented in a separate supplied DLL and it is not necessary to install Chrome.
The alternate PDF renderer used in earlier CopiaFacts versions is also available for FFEXTERN conversions, selected by the image option keyword orig. If you use on-the-fly PDF rendering (for small PDFs only, see below) in COPIAFACTS the original renderer is recomended, because the PDFium converter does not currently support multiple concurrent conversions in the same process and COPIAFACTS has to block conversions in all other channels when one is actively converting.
 | Note that the original converter also uses much more process memory than the default PDFium converter. For this reason we do not recommend using on-the-fly rendering for documents of more than about a dozen pages. The Converter Options page must be used to set the page-count threshold above which on-the-fly conversion will not be used. If you know that your users may attempt to convert documents of a hundred pages or more, do not ignore this recommendation. |
This orig option is automatically selected if the PDFium conversion fails, which typically occurs only if the PDF contains certain rarely-encountered features, or if there is a version mis-match on the PDFIUM DLL. To suppress this fallback to the original renderer, and instead fail the conversion, add an environment variable in FAXFACTS.CFG:
$environment * SuppressOrigPDF yes
The available image options are documented in the Image Rendering Options topic.
