Advanced TIFF Editor is a Windows program from Graphic-Region Development for viewing, editing and converting multipage TIFF, PDF and fax documents. It handles scanned paperwork and other page-based images. Its tools reorder and clean up pages, add annotations, run text recognition and convert whole folders of files in one job. You need a license after the free trial. A separate PLUS edition targets very large multipage files.
Opening TIFF, PDF and fax files
Advanced TIFF Editor opens TIFF and fax files along with PDF, EPS, PS, AI, DCX, JBIG, DICOM, HEIC, WEBP and common graphic formats. PDF, AI, EPS and PS files need the separate Ghostscript plug-in. You install it once, then select it in the program settings.
Output covers multipage TIFF and PDF, fax, JPEG, PNG, GIF, BMP, PostScript/EPS, DCX and several older bitmap formats. For TIFF, the Advanced button in the Save As dialog selects the compression: PackBits, LZW, CCITT Group 3 or Group 4, ZIP or Adobe ZIP. You can set a separate default for color and black-and-white images. A multipage TIFF can store each page with its own compression.
Working with pages
A thumbnail panel shows every page of the open document. Any command applies to all selected pages at once.
The Pages menu handles document structure:
- insert or append one page, or all pages, from other files at the current position or at the end
- move a page to a new position, cut, copy and paste pages, or paste an image as a new page
- split a page in two, horizontally or vertically, by dragging a splitter on its preview
- combine several pages into one page
- delete all blank pages, using a threshold to decide what counts as blank
- reorder a scanned booklet back into reading order
You can merge whole files, with all pages or only selected ones. You can also split a multipage TIFF or PDF into separate files.
Cleaning up scanned pages
Most of Advanced TIFF Editor’s image tools target scanned documents. Deskewing measures the angle of printed text lines and rotates the page to straighten them. A finer mode tests small rotation steps across a set range to find the best angle. Remove Noise and Remove Isolated Pixels clear specks from black-and-white pages, and Remove Punch Holes finds hole marks and erases them.
Auto Crop tools trim scanner borders by background color, text density or edge lines. Other tools change color depth, including conversion from color to 1-bit black and white by dithering or threshold, and adjust image size, canvas size, resolution and margins.
Annotations and signatures
On TIFF files, Advanced TIFF Editor adds annotation objects: highlights, lines, boxes, freehand drawing, single-line and multiline text, rulers and angles, date and time stamps, images and stamps from an editable list. Each object keeps its own pen, brush and font settings. You can move or resize it later.
You can store annotations in three ways. Saved in the TIFF file’s tags, they stay editable. Saved to a separate annotation file, they travel apart from the image. Combined with the background, they become a permanent part of the page. Some object types, including ellipses, rulers and angles, cannot be kept as editable objects and need to be combined with the page. Annotations can also be exported to and imported from XML.
Image stamps with a transparent white background let you place a scanned signature on TIFF or PDF pages without a white box around it.
Text recognition
The OCR tool reads text from page images in more than 40 languages, including Chinese and Japanese. It works on single pages, on all pages of a multipage file and in batch mode across many files.
Batch conversion
The batch dialog in Advanced TIFF Editor takes a list of files or whole folders, an output folder and a target format, or sends the files to a printer instead. An Actions tab adds processing steps that run on every file during conversion. These include noise removal, deskewing, resizing, cropping, color depth changes, text watermarks with automatic font size, unbooklet reordering and removal of TIFF tags and metadata. You can also merge multiple TIFF and PDF files in a batch.
Scanning, printing and capture
Pages come in from TWAIN and WIA scanners and cameras. You can append them to the end of the document or insert them at a chosen position. The optional virtual printer appears in Windows as a printer; anything printed to it from another application opens in Advanced TIFF Editor as an image document.
You can print documents, send them by email through MAPI or Outlook, or print them from the command line. A tag editor shows every tag in a TIFF file and lets the user add, change or delete tags. All processing runs on the local computer.
Standard and PLUS editions
Advanced TIFF Editor PLUS includes every function of the standard edition. It loads only the current page instead of reading a whole document into memory. This keeps very large multipage files workable. PLUS also adds webcam capture, the booklet command, and Stacked Pages and Crop tools.
