[Blindmath] Extracting bitmap images from pdf files

[Richard Baldwin]

Hi Jamal,

It is a great program, easy to use, and probably totally accessible. I
particularly like the fact that the program doesn't require a windows
installation. The output data is well organized and including the page
numbers in the bmp file names is a great help in analyzing them.

Unfortunately, the output produced by the program suffers from the same
issues that I have encountered with all of the other image extractor
programs that I have tried. A few of the images come out intact. Most of
the images don't come out intact.

For example, page three of one of the pdf files that I tested has a single
image of a battery. It is the same image that I enhanced and posted in an
earlier post. Your program produced 54 bmp files for that page. A few of
them were icons such as arrows exclamation marks, etc. The remaining bmp
files appear to be a very small pieces of the image of the battery. By the
way, I got the earlier image of the battery by taking a screen shot of the
page and using an image editing program to crop out the battery image. None
of the image extraction programs that I have tested extract the image
intact.

I don't know anything at all about the internal structure of pdf files, and
this behavior of breaking an image into many small pieces may depend on how
the file is constructed in the first place. In any event, my immediate
problem has to do with a specific set of pdf files that are the chapters
from a specific physics book, so this program doesn't solve my problem.

Thanks for offering the program.
Dick Baldwin

On Fri, Jan 27, 2012 at 5:18 AM, Jamal Mazrui <empower at smart.net> wrote:

> In an attempt to facilitate a free, non-web dependent solution, I have
> written a Windows console-mode utility called PDF2Images, built with
> PowerBASIC and a PDF library.  The distribution archive, including
> documentation and source code, is available at
>
> http://empowermentzone.com/**pdf2images.zip<http://empowermentzone.com/pdf2images.zip>
>
> I am interested in any feedback on how well it works compared to other
> approaches.
>
> Jamal
>
>
>


-- 
Richard G. Baldwin (Dick Baldwin)
Home of Baldwin's on-line Java Tutorials
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Professor of Computer Information Technology
Austin Community College
(512) 223-4758
mailto:Baldwin at DickBaldwin.com
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