How to convert PDF files to images

Question

I need to convert PDF files to images. If the PDF file is multi-page，I just need one image that contains all of the PDF pages.

Is there an open sou

Answer 1

Apache PDFBox also works great for me.

Usage with the command line tool:

javar -jar pdfbox-app-2.0.19.jar PDFToImage -quality 1.0  -dpi 150 -prefix out_dir/page -format png

Answer 2

The PDF engine used in Google Chrome, called PDFium, is open source under the "BSD 3-clause" license. I believe this allows redistribution when used in a commercial product.

There is a .NET wrapper for it called PdfiumViewer (NuGet) which works well to the extent I have tried it. It is under the Apache license which also allows redistribution.

(Note that this is NOT the same 'wrapper' as https://pdfium.patagames.com/ which requires a commercial license*)

(There is one other PDFium .NET wrapper, PDFiumSharp, but I have not evaluated it.)

In my opinion, so far, this may be the best choice of open-source (free as in beer) PDF libraries to do the job which do not put restrictions on the closed-source / commercial nature of the software utilizing them. I don't think anything else in the answers here satisfy that criteria, to the best of my knowledge.

Answer 3

You can use Ghostscript to convert PDF to images.

To use Ghostscript from .NET you can take a look at Ghostscript.NET library (managed wrapper around the Ghostscript library).

To produce image from the PDF by using Ghostscript.NET, take a look at RasterizerSample.

To combine multiple images into the single image, check out this sample: http://www.niteshluharuka.com/2012/08/combine-several-images-to-form-a-single-image-using-c/#

Answer 4

I kind of bumped into this project at SourceForge. It seems to me it's still active.

1. PDF convert to JPEG at SourceForge
2. Developer's site

My two cents.

Answer 5

The thread "converting PDF file to a JPEG image" is suitable for your request.

One solution is to use a third-party library. ImageMagick is a very popular and is freely available too. You can get a .NET wrapper for it here. The original ImageMagick download page is here.

• Convert PDF pages to image files using the Solid Framework Convert PDF pages to image files using the Solid Framework (dead link, the deleted document is available on Internet Archive).
• Convert PDF to JPG Universal Document Converter
• 6 Ways to Convert a PDF to a JPG Image

And you also can take a look at the thread "How to open a page from a pdf file in pictureBox in C#".

If you use this process to convert a PDF to tiff, you can use this class to retrieve the bitmap from TIFF.

public class TiffImage
{
    private string myPath;
    private Guid myGuid;
    private FrameDimension myDimension;
    public ArrayList myImages = new ArrayList();
    private int myPageCount;
    private Bitmap myBMP;

    public TiffImage(string path)
    {
        MemoryStream ms;
        Image myImage;

        myPath = path;
        FileStream fs = new FileStream(myPath, FileMode.Open);
        myImage = Image.FromStream(fs);
        myGuid = myImage.FrameDimensionsList[0];
        myDimension = new FrameDimension(myGuid);
        myPageCount = myImage.GetFrameCount(myDimension);
        for (int i = 0; i < myPageCount; i++)
        {
            ms = new MemoryStream();
            myImage.SelectActiveFrame(myDimension, i);
            myImage.Save(ms, ImageFormat.Bmp);
            myBMP = new Bitmap(ms);
            myImages.Add(myBMP);
            ms.Close();
        }
        fs.Close();
    }
}

Use it like so:

private void button1_Click(object sender, EventArgs e)
{
    TiffImage myTiff = new TiffImage("D:\\Some.tif");
    //imageBox is a PictureBox control, and the [] operators pass back
    //the Bitmap stored at that position in the myImages ArrayList in the TiffImage
    this.pictureBox1.Image = (Bitmap)myTiff.myImages[0];
    this.pictureBox2.Image = (Bitmap)myTiff.myImages[1];
    this.pictureBox3.Image = (Bitmap)myTiff.myImages[2];
}

Answer 6

There is a free nuget package (Pdf2Image), which allows the extraction of pdf pages to jpg files or to a collection of images (List ) in just one line

        string file = "c:\\tmp\\test.pdf";

        List<System.Drawing.Image> images = PdfSplitter.GetImages(file, PdfSplitter.Scale.High);

        PdfSplitter.WriteImages(file, "c:\\tmp", PdfSplitter.Scale.High, PdfSplitter.CompressionLevel.Medium);

All source is also available on github Pdf2Image