How can I extract images from a PDF file? [closed]

Answer 1

pdfimages does just that. It's is part of the poppler-utils and xpdf-utils packages.

From the manpage:

Pdfimages saves images from a Portable Document Format (PDF) file as Portable Pixmap (PPM), Portable Bitmap (PBM), or JPEG files.

Pdfimages reads the PDF file, scans one or more pages, PDF-file, and writes one PPM, PBM, or JPEG file for each image, image-root-nnn.xxx, where nnn is the image number and xxx is the image type (.ppm, .pbm, .jpg).

NB: pdfimages extracts the raw image data from the PDF file, without performing any additional transforms. Any rotation, clipping, color inversion, etc. done by the PDF content stream is ignored.

Answer 2

With regards to Perl, have you checked CPAN?

• PDF::GetImages - get images from pdf document
• PDF::OCR - get ocr and images out of a pdf file
• PDF::OCR2 - extract all text and all image ocr from pdf

Answer 3

pdfimages is nice as it does not reencode but only extract jpegs. But there is a bug:

pdfimages comes from package "poppler-utils" or from the bigger "xpdf-utils". At least in Ubuntu "poppler-utils" comes already pre-installed. The pdfimages in poppler-utils 10.0.3 (Ubuntu 9.04 Jaunty) still does not react to the option "-j" to extract ".jpg". It always extracts ".ppm".

As a workaround you may replace "poppler-utils" with "xpdf-utils": $ sudo apt-get install xpdf-utils

with kind regards,

+++ Oliver