Create PNG, JPG, GIF pictures / images from PDF
on Linux
I've received a
PDF file with a
plan for development of a
bundle of projects, My task was to evaluate this plan and give
feeback on the 44 pages PDF document.
Since don't know of
program to directly be able edit PDF files
on GNU / Linux?, my initial idea was to open and
convert the
PDF to ODT / DOC with
OpenOffice (Libre Office)
and then edit the
ODT file.
Unfortunately
Open Office oowrite program was unable
to open / visualize the PDF file. My assumption is
OO
failure to open the PDF is because the PDF was generated on
Microsoft Windows with
Adobe illustrator or
smth.
The idea that came to my mind as alternative, way to edit the PDF
file was to convert it in pictures edit and then convert the
pictures to PDF.
In other words to follow these 3 steps:
1. Convert the PDF document to multiple images
2. Edit each of the images with GIMP or Inkscape
3. Convert back all images to a single PDF file
Some time ago, I've written an article
how to create PDF file from many image files in JPEG, PNG or GIF on
Linux
. This prior article was exactly describing how to complete
Step
3.Therefore all left was to find a way to
convert the PDF
file to multiple JPEG / PNG / GIF images.
convert command to convert PDF document to multiple pictures
which you can take from my earlier article is:
$ convert *.jpg outputpdffile.pdf
Actually in
Step 1 I was aiming to do the opposite of what I've
previously done.
Hence, in order to
convert the singe Project.PDF file to
multiple PNG images, I just switched
convert IN / OUT
arguments order.
hipo@noah:~/project-pdf-to-images$ convert Project.pdf
Project.png
...
I've done the
PDF to pictures conversion on my notebook running
Debian Squeeze (6.0.2) GNU / Linux. Convertion of the PDF file
to 44 images, took
25 seconds on my dual core 1.8 Ghz / 2GB
RAM
Thinkpad r61.
Afterwards, I've had at hand 44
PNG files generated,
e.g.:
hipo@noah:~/project-pdf-to-images$ ls -al Project-*.png |wc
-l
44
convert was also smart enough to produce correct file
naming. The output file names were:
Project-1.png
Project-2.png
etc.
Nicely each number (-1.png) was corresponding to the respective PDF
page. For instance
Project-10.png was corresponding to page
10 of the
Projects.PDF file
Rather ironically, after
convertion of the PDF to pictures,
while opening the
Project-1.png, I've noticed
The
GIMP - (The GNU Image Manipulation Program) is capable of
directly reading PDF files. GIMP has both the option to open files
in layers or separate images ;)
Anyways even if GIMP is used to modify the different PDF pages as
layers, once completed GIMP doesn't have the ability to save the
file as PDF and therefore once saved the file if merging of layers
is done the resulting picture becomes
ONE BIG MESS.
Therefore it seems my the
3 steps way e.g.:
1. convertion PDF to pictures
2. picture edit with GIMP or Inkscape
3. convertion of pictures back to PDF
is still the only way to "modify PDF" in Linux. I will be glad to
hear if someone has come up with a better solution?