Screw Drivers and PDF Files

[der Mouse]

>> Which of those "several open source packages" includes a scriptable
>> (ie, command-line) tool to extract the embedded images from a PDF?
> 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.

Did you not see where I said "scriptable"?  "Print to file" from a GUI
interface (like xpdf) doesn't count.

You also appear to have missed the part where I want to *extract* the
image, not convert it to yet another wrapper format (such as
PostScript).

There *is* pdfimages, but that's not what you appeared to be talking
about.  (I also don't actually know whether it works, though I would
tend to assume it does - vide infra.)

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

...from PDF to PostScript, which is not what I wanted.

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

You clearly have never tried to do anything useful with the PostScript
resulting from pdf2ps; it is not suitable for doing anything with at
finer than page granualrity.

I don't know what kind of stuff xpdf generates; I haven't yet got
around to building any of that.  (I was made aware of it only recently,
and even more recently did I get hints on how to build it without all
the GUI goop.)

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