Just to put some of your misconceptions straight...
" I don't have a licensed copy of acrobat so I don't know how I'd convert 10,000 files to tiff."
You can convert PDFs to TIFF with the help of Free (as in liberty) and free (as in beer) Ghostscript. Your choice if you want to do it on Linux Mint or on Windows 7. The commandline for Linux is:
gs \
-o input.tif \
-sDEVICE=tiffg4 \
input.pdf
"i don't want 10,000 30 page documents turned into 30,000 individual tiff images"
You can have "multipage" TIFFs easily. Above command does create such TIFFs of the G4 (fax tiff) flavor. Should you even want single-page TIFFs instead, you can modify the command:
gs \
-o input_page_%03d.tif \
-sDEVICE=tiffg4 \
input.pdf
The %03d part of the output filename will automatically translate into a series of 001, 002, 003 etc.
Caveats:
- The default resolution for the
tiffg4 output device is 204x196 dpi. You probably want a better value. To get 720 dpi you should add -r720x720 to the commandline.
- Also, if your Ghostscript installation uses letter as its default media size, you may want to change it. You can use
-gXxY to set widthxheight in device points. So to get ISO A4 output page dimensions in landscape you can add a -g8420x5950 parameter.
So the full command which controls these two parameters, to produce 720 dpi output on A4 in portrait orientation, would read:
gs \
-o input.tif \
-sDEVICE=tiffg4 \
-r720x720 \
-g5950x8420 \
input.pdf
