Ghostscript PDF -> TIFF conversion is awful for me, people rave about it, I alone look sullen.

Answer 1

tiffg4 is a black&white output device. You should use tiff24nc or tiff12nc as the output device colour PDFs - see ghostscript output devices. These will be uncompressed but you could put the resulting TIFFs through imagemagick or similar to resave as compressed TIFF.

Answer 2

It is quite nice for a fax! ;-)

danio's answer is probably the best, if you need a color copy.

I notice also, from the linked thread, that you omitted to specify DPI for the output, hence the bad look... If you need pure dithered B&W, you should use a higher resolution.

I also got a good looking image using NConvert

nconvert -page 1 -out tiff -dpi 200 -c 2 -o c.tif FMD.pdf

I mention it for the record, because I think you need a license to redistribute it (it is free for personal use otherwise).

Answer 3

Thanks guys this is what I ended up with

     os.popen(' '.join([
                       self._ghostscriptPath + 'gswin32c.exe', 
                       '-q',
                       '-dNOPAUSE',
                       '-dBATCH',
                       '-r800',
                       '-sDEVICE=tiffg4',
                       '-sPAPERSIZE=a4',
                       '-sOutputFile=%s %s' % (tifDest, pdfSource),
                       ]))

Answer 4

If only we could disable Dither in Ghost Script.

Answer 5

jeff:

Have you ever tried the "-dDITHERPPI=<lpi>" parameter with Ghostscript? (Reasonable values for lpi are N/5 to N/20, where N is the resolution in dpi.)