TIFF to PDF

The format scanners love and nobody can open

TIFF is the archival format: lossless, uncompressed or gently compressed, and the default output of flatbed scanners, multifunction copiers, and fax systems for forty years. A scanned contract, a faxed form, a museum's digitized photograph — odds are it is a .tif file. The catch is that almost nothing outside imaging software displays TIFF: browsers cannot render it, phones cannot preview it, and email clients refuse it.

PDF is what TIFF archives turn into when they need to move. Converting keeps every pixel, puts each page in order, and produces a file that opens anywhere — including the court e-filing portals, insurance claim systems, and government upload forms that accept PDF and nothing else.

What this converter does

A TIFF decoder runs entirely in your browser, so scans never leave the device.

Lossless vs. lossy: which to pick

Lossless (PNG) is the default and the right choice for anything you are archiving or submitting: text stays crisp, fine lines survive, and the PDF is a faithful copy of the scan. The trade-off is size — a page of lossless TIFF becomes a page of lossless PNG, and neither compresses photographic content well.

Lossy (JPEG) is for sharing. At 90% quality a scanned page is visually identical to the original at a fraction of the bytes, which matters when the recipient's mailbox caps attachments at 25 MB. For documents that will be OCR'd or printed, stay lossless; for documents that will be read on screen, lossy is usually fine.

Compression schemes, handled

TIFF is less a format than a container for a dozen compression schemes: uncompressed RGB, PackBits, LZW, Deflate, JPEG-in-TIFF, and the CCITT fax encodings that black-and-white scans use. The decoder handles the common ones, including the Group 3 and Group 4 fax compressions that most multi-page document TIFFs are written in.

If a file uses an exotic encoding the decoder cannot read, the tool reports the failure on that file rather than producing a blank page — convert it to PNG or JPEG first and use the Image to PDF tool instead.

TIFF to PDF vs. the alternatives