The volumes of the GCS at the Kaiser Wilhelm Library in Posen in Poland are in .DjVu format, which is rather inconvenient. So today I have been looking at whether it is possible to convert them to PDF. I’ve had some success, I must say.
I obtained a copy of IrfanView from the web. You need the basic .exe download, but also the plugins, because one of these makes it possible to work with .djvu files.
Once I had installed this, I opened the index.djvu for one of the GCS volumes. This in fact opened all the files, as it does in the DjVu reader. I then followed the instructions here:
1) With “IrFanView” go to “File->Print” or ‘Ctrl+p’
2) On the window select “Printer: Adobe PDF”, hit “Printer setup” for the paper size you want, etc…., in the middle of that window says “”Print size” select “Best fit to page(aspect ratio)”
3) On the right side of that window you will see the Preview, under preview is “Multiple images” select “Print all pages”
4) When you’re finished hit “Print” and is going to ask you the name of file you want to save it.
And that’s it!! after severals minutes (i think hours, depending on how many images the DJVU file has) you’re going to have a PDF file with the info you want!
But it doesn’t take hours. However I did run into a glitch: I got this error:
%%[ ProductName: Distiller ]%%
%%[Page: 1]%%
%%[Page: 2]%%
%%[Page: 3]%%
%%[Page: 4]%%
%%[Page: 5]%%
%%[Page: 6]%%
%%[Page: 7]%%
%%[Page: 8]%%
%%[Page: 9]%%
%%[Page: 10]%%
%%[Page: 11]%%
%%[Page: 12]%%
%%[Page: 13]%%
%%[Page: 14]%%
%%[Page: 15]%%
%%[Page: 16]%%
%%[Page: 17]%%
%%[ Error: invalidfileaccess; OffendingCommand: showpage ]%%
%%[ Flushing: rest of job (to end-of-file) will be ignored ]%%
%%[ Warning: PostScript error. No PDF file produced. ] %%
A bit of hunting around revealed an answer:
… the issue appears to be with my Kaspersky Anti-Virus software. By setting a check mark against most of the exclusions in the Kaspersky application control for Acrobat Distiller everything now seems to be working OK.
I.e. in Settings … Application Control … Applications … (long pause when you hit that button!) … ADOBE SYSTEMS, then right-click on Acrobat Distiller, Application Rules … Exclusions, and check everything except “Do not scan network traffic”.
This worked; and Irfanview ran through 500+ pages and created a perfectly good PDF, some 500Mb in size.
The only downside is that I ended up with a white margin on the right and bottom, where the image was padded out to A4 (or whatever). Nothing I could do would change that. Probably I just haven’t got the settings just right.