tif/jpg conversion to postscript

[Hamish Moffatt <hamish@debian.org>]

I have a whole lot of old magazine articles in a mix of TIF and JPG format
-- one file per page. The provided viewer software for this is an awful
Windows program, so I want to convert them to PDF.

I'm using imagemagick; given the whole set of TIF and JPG files in
order on the command line, it converts the whole lot to one postscript
file just fine.. [*] The only problem is that it reads the entire set
of tif/jpg files into memory and it's using roughly 248Mb of RAM
for 30 pages. Unfortunately I only have 128Mb of RAM, so it spends
the whole time swapping! It's taking roughly 13 minutes per set
as a result; the generated postscript files are about 191Mb.

[*] I convert the PS files to PDF with ghostscript's ps2pdf; imagemagick
can convert direct to PDF but the resulting files are larger.

Anyone know a better way? I've tried converting page by page and
then merging them using either psmerge (which generates no output
except postscript headers), and another run of convert (which works
but ruins the quality in the process -- don't know why).

tiff2ps does a quicker job of converting the TIFF files, but only does
one at a time and doesn't do JPG. Does anyone know a quicker way of
doing this conversion? How about how to make 'convert' merge postscript
files without ruining the quality? Unfortunately it's still likely
to read the whole lot into RAM (ie swap).

Perhaps I should use the crap Windows software along with Acrobat
PDF Writer on Windows to do it..

thanks
Hamish
-- 
Hamish Moffatt VK3SB. CCs of replies on mailing lists are welcome.