Create PDF Documents with Gimp and LibreOffice Draw

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LibreOffice Draw allows you to easily take multiple images of various formats and drop them into a multiple page PDF. You can create your own PDF document from images or other file types. You can author hybrid text and image PDF documents.

Draw is able to create slideshows for presentation, however, it is also a really nice PDF authoring software.

Scan, Convert, and Generate a PDF

This process was accomplished under Linux Mint and applies to Ubuntu, and other related Debian based distributions. If your software versions are not the same you will still most likely be able to accomplish the same task with some minor differences in where a particular feature is located under the software menus.

Software used was entirely Free Open Source tools. Here is a list of software with the version

  • Simple Scan 3.20.0
  • Gimp 2.8.16
  • LibreOffice Draw 5.1.6.2

Goal: Scan multiple documents and create a single ordered PDF. Using Gimp clean up documents removing artifacts, smudges or accomplish any minor editing.

Steps involved.

  1. Scan each document and save in the format JPG or PNG
  2. Open each scanned page in Gimp. Make edits if necessary. For B&W scans using gimp you can goto COLORS -> Brightness Contract and darken or increase contract, then goto IMAGE -> MODE -> INDEX and convert to 1-bit. Don't do this for color pages.
  3. Using GIMP export each to the files. FILE -> EXPORT AS for B&W 1-bit I use PNG. You may use PNG for color or JPG.
  4. Using DRAW start with a new document and choose FORMAT -> PAGE SLIDE PROPERTIES and change Margins all to 0 (zero).
  5. Using DRAW INSERT -> IMAGE for the first page of your PDF
  6. Using DRAW you may add additional pages by INSERT -> NEW PAGE OR SLIDE then for the new page repeat process INSERT -> IMAGE
  7. With all pages added, choose FILE -> EXPORT AS PDF
  8. In General tab of EXPORT dialog uncheck "bookmarks", use Lossless compression for 1-bit B&W pages or if you have color pages you can use JPEG compression to help reduce the size of the resulting PDF document containing multiple pages.
  9. Click EXPORT

Tips:

  • In DRAW I have found if you view each page/slide zoomed, the inserted image will not be centered. Zoom out to 50% or so that you can see the entire page, then insert the image and it will / should automatically center

Related Pages

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