Many companies and people recognize the power of the portable document format (PDF) as a relatively foolproof method of transmitting documents as WYSIWIG. For many people, that's the desired end result and nothing more need be done. So when products are offered that convert PDF documents to raster TIFFs, those people generally don't understand the point.

The truth is that when you convert PDF to TIFF, it remains a WYSIWIG, but it is much reduced in size. This allows the transmission of such documents over the web at a much faster rate. It also eliminates the need to bring up Adobe's PDF.

TIFF was developed in the mid-80s and was designed to deal with volumes of paper documents. These paper documents were scanned and saved as TIFFs to be stored electronically. The TIFF format became and is still commonly used for archiving documents. Since the TIFF format grew to become the most common format used for archiving, the legal industry and government agencies often require that documents are saved as TIFFs. This means that you may need to convert PDF documents into TIFFs.

Many existing document storage and retrieval systems, even going back 20-30 years, were designed to work with TIFF. It is actually more of a universal format than PDF. A lot of archivists trust the likelihood that TIFF will survive to the next century more than PDF, both because it is less complicated and also because the standard has a life of its own, independent of any company, unlike PDF from Adobe.

PDF to TIFF file conversion is often accomplished by using a printer driver. If you are an individual user only converting a few files, this method is sufficient. However, if you have multiple users dealing with a large number of documents and images across your organization, using a tool to convert your images is a more efficient method. Free PDF to JPG/TIFF/PNG is such a program to help convert PDF to TIFF, working with Windows computer without any type of payment & requiring no Acrobat.