[Web4lib] Extracting images from PDF?

[William Denton]

On 14 December 2005, Robert Sullivan wrote:

> I'm considering trying to take these images apart and reassemble them
> in a more useful way.  We have Acrobat 7, but our graphics staff uses
> it at a fairly low level so they can't help me.  I have found
> references to software which will let you save images form PDFs as
> TIFFs, but I was hoping for some real world experience.

ImageMagick can do this, and pretty nicely, it turns out:

 	http://www.imagemagick.org/

It's free as in beer and speech and will run on Windows.  I took a 
two-page PDF and ran

$ convert handout.pdf handout.png

and it created handout-0.png and handout-1.png. It knew enough to split 
them into different pages, which is great, but won't work for you.  Still, 
in one pass you could convert PDFs to something else and then edit them. 
I noticed the quality of the PNG wasn't too good but perhaps other formats 
would give better results, or you could tweak something.

Bill
-- 
William Denton : Toronto, Canada : www.miskatonic.org : www.frbr.org