Ever wondered how to render PDF-s into individual pictures page by page? It is really simple.
Warning to all of those who are allergic to command line: The following method does imply use (albeit very simple) of CLI.
Here we will be using a tool called ImageMagick. This is a widely available tool with unparalleled versatility in a variety of areas, but is by no means the only one: there are plenty of other tools to do the same thing. The following is only one method of many.
1) So first of all you will need to install ImageMagick. In Ubuntu you would do:
2) Then open up a terminal, and browse to the location of the PDF you want to convert. Say, if your PDF was in /home/username/PDFs, you would do the following:
3) Let’s say that you have a PDF file called test.pdf and you want it to convert to PNG files. You also want these PNG files’ filename to begin page. Then you would run:
This will give you as many PNG files named page-01.png, page-02.png, … as there are pages in your original PDF.
If you wanted JPEG files instead just run:
You might also want to control the resolution of the resulting image files. To do that you must specify the -density option. It is hard to predict what number you should give, so try to experiment to get the desired result. If you wanted a density of, say, 800, you would run:
Want to select certain pages only? No problem, to convert only the first page – run:
You may also specify a range. So to convert the first three pages run:
Several ranges are also possible:
(Note that the output files will be consecutively named in the latter example, so you will get files page-0.png, -1, -2, -3, -4 and -5.png. NOT as you would expect page-0.png, -1, -2, -4, -5 and -6)
Edit: If you are inclined to use another conversion utility, try pdftoppm from the package poppler-utils. Works very well, too…
Or
Warning to all of those who are allergic to command line: The following method does imply use (albeit very simple) of CLI.
Here we will be using a tool called ImageMagick. This is a widely available tool with unparalleled versatility in a variety of areas, but is by no means the only one: there are plenty of other tools to do the same thing. The following is only one method of many.
1) So first of all you will need to install ImageMagick. In Ubuntu you would do:
sudo apt-get install imagemagick2) Then open up a terminal, and browse to the location of the PDF you want to convert. Say, if your PDF was in /home/username/PDFs, you would do the following:
cd /home/username/PDFs3) Let’s say that you have a PDF file called test.pdf and you want it to convert to PNG files. You also want these PNG files’ filename to begin page. Then you would run:
convert test.pdf page.pngThis will give you as many PNG files named page-01.png, page-02.png, … as there are pages in your original PDF.
If you wanted JPEG files instead just run:
convert test.pdf page.jpgYou might also want to control the resolution of the resulting image files. To do that you must specify the -density option. It is hard to predict what number you should give, so try to experiment to get the desired result. If you wanted a density of, say, 800, you would run:
convert -density 800 test.pdf page.pngWant to select certain pages only? No problem, to convert only the first page – run:
convert "test.pdf[0]" page.pngYou may also specify a range. So to convert the first three pages run:
convert "test.pdf[0-2]" page.pngSeveral ranges are also possible:
convert "test.pdf[0-2,4-6]" page.png(Note that the output files will be consecutively named in the latter example, so you will get files page-0.png, -1, -2, -3, -4 and -5.png. NOT as you would expect page-0.png, -1, -2, -4, -5 and -6)
Edit: If you are inclined to use another conversion utility, try pdftoppm from the package poppler-utils. Works very well, too…
Or
gs -sDEVICE=jpeg -sOutputFile=test.jpg test.pdf
REFERENCES
http://blog.dr-ivan.com/2009/06/28/tips-tricks-converting-pdf-s-to-pictures-in-linux
http://answers.google.com/answers/threadview?id=134543
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/467793/how-do-i-convert-a-pdf-document-to-a-preview-image-in-php
