iiif PDF creation, Edison‐Miller Family Papers - mgenuardi/TAEP_documentation GitHub Wiki

(last updated 20250905)

IIIF > PDF

  • What is pdiiif: The ability to create a PDF of documents/images, including metadata, from a IIIF manifest. The output is a PDF with an introductory page of text containing the metadata from the manifest, followed by the documents/images associated with/within the manifest.

  • How to use it: Using a pdiiif generator (a website/interface supplied by IIIF community members), add the manifest link to the link box and press "generate PDF." The PDF will automatically download.

  • What did we use if for at TAEP: Creating PDFs for each item set of the Edison-Miller Family Papers Collections. At these point (sept.2025), the item sets of 5 collections have been/are being created:

1-3. Family Papers Part III, IV, and V already exist within the Microfilm Edition,

  1. Edison-Ford Winter Estate,
  1. (partially) the David E. E. Sloane Collection (some missing images preventing completing all the PDF creation).

TAEP Specific Process

  • Navigate to the item set to create in Omeka. For Example, Edison Ford Winter Estate item set X104B1 (https://edisondigital.rutgers.edu/folder/X104B1-F), containing 13 individual items.

  • Click into the individual item to go its record. Click on the IIIF logo to copy the manifest. For example, the first item is X104B1A. Its manifest is: https://edisondigital.rutgers.edu/iiif/2/X104B1A/manifest

  • Using an already created website/source (we used https://iiif2pdf.crossasia.org), add manifest link to box, click Generate PDF. Do this for each item in an item set. In our example of X104B1, this will be done 13 times, resulting in 13 PDFs.

  • Merge the 13 PDFs into one, item-set level PDF in Adobe (Create > Multiple Files).

  • The created PDF results in a familiar problem, that the page with metadata/text is a regular document size, whereas the size of the jpg images fluctuate, and generally appear much smaller. Because of this, we then go through another step of saving the PDF as "Scale to Fit":

  • [Mac User] Close out of Adobe, and open merged PDF using the application Preview. In Preview, click "Print." Select option "Scale to Fit." Click "Save As" and save as PDF.

  • After the PDF has been created and scaled, add the descriptive introduction (previously created as a word doc and saved as a PDF). These pages are 1) The Overarching collection and series info, 2) The item set description.

  • Check PDF for title info, order of items, issues with images, etc.

Notes

  • At fist I was "scale to fitting" each PDF, one at a time, before combining them into one PDF. Eventually I realized that, because we don't need each individual item PDF (they mainly exist to be combined into the one item-set PDF), I could combine all first, and then scale to fit the combined PDF, and then add the external Target Pages.

  • Note that it does make a difference if you add the external target pages (word docs created of description, word > PDF) before or after you "scale to fit" because it of course affects them too. Doesn't make a huge difference but be consistent. I think it better to add after, cause the scaling does look a bit weird with those.

  • TAEP GLOCs identify distinct, but related material by adding a "1" or an "a" to the GLOC, i.e. X104OE and X104OE1. When combining PDFs in Adobe, the PDF with the "1" would be merged before the PDF without the "1", even though the file order in the folder had the "1" after. Therefore, check the order of the combined PDF. I've manually changed the order so that X104OE would appear before X1040E1.

Pros/Cons

  • Pro: Metadata automatically downloaded into PDF as intro target page, for each item. For users, this provides metadata at item level. For us, providing that level of metadata would have taken a much longer time. Also, because the images are a part of this process/a part of the manifest, it completely cuts out the process of us having to manually organize the images, or set up an automated process to do so.

  • Cons: I did have some trouble with the stability of the pdiiif generator websites. The generators seem to be created by iiif community users, and the initial generator I used went out of use. I started with http://pdiiif.jbaiter.de but it unexpectedly stopped working for me. Nicole found https://iiif2pdf.crossasia.org which worked well over time and seems to be stable. However, I did have some trouble with it once and awhile, either it would be very slow or wouldn't complete PDF creation. It always bounced back, but I did try searching around for some other options. I found another that worked but didn't inlcude the intro metadata, just the images, which may be fine in some circumstances but we wanted this process to include the metadata. https://iiif2pdf.crossasia.org still seems to be the best option.