Screw Drivers and PDF Files

[Scott Stevens]

On Fri, 3 Jun 2005 01:41:32 -0400 (EDT)
der Mouse <mouse at rodents.montreal.qc.ca> wrote:

> > The point was that anyone that wants to be able to easily handle
> > PDF's can do so very cheaply and are not required to deal with
> > either Micro$loth or Adobe.
> 
> Easily?
> 
> Which of those "several open source packages" includes a scriptable
> (ie, command-line) tool to extract the embedded images from a PDF?
> (Not to render them and give the resulting rendered image, but to
> extract the image itself.)  Certainly ghostscript couldn't last time I
> looked.
> 

With the xpdf program, which runs under X, and which IS open-source
(I've certainly never run a binary of it that I didn't compile locally
from source) you can use 'print to file' to convert a PDF, or selected
pages from a PDF, to a postscript file.  

There is also a pdf2ps utility bundled with ghostscript that does the
conversion.  

Then you can use all the nice free tools to mess with the postscript (or
dig into it with vi or emacs).