resolution from a PDFPage?

Question

I have a PDF document that is created by creating NSImages with size in 72dpi pts, each has a single representation which is measured in pixels. I then put these images into PDFPages with initWithImage, and then save the document.

When I open the document, I need the resolution of the original image. However, all of the rectangles that PDFPage gives me are measured in points, not pixels.

I know that the information is in there, and I suppose I can try to parse the PDF data myself, by going through the voyeur.app example... but that's a WHOLE lot of effort to do something that should be pretty normal...

Is there an easier way to do this?

Added:

I've tried two techniques:

1. get the PDFRepresentation data from the page, and use it to make a new NSImage via initWithData. This works, however, the image has both size and pixel size in 72dpi.

2. Draw the PDFPage into a new off-screen context, and then get a CGImage from that. The problem is that when I'm making the context, it appears that I need to know the size in pixels already, which defeats part of the purpose...

Answer 1

There are a few things you need to understand about PDF:

• The PDF Coordinate system is in points (1/72 inch) by default.

• The PDF Coordinate system is devoid of resolution. (this is a white lie - the resolution is effectively the limits of 32 bit floating point numbers).

• Images in PDF do not inherently have any resolution attached to them (this is a white lie - images compressed with JPEG2000 still have resolution in their embedded metadata).

• An Image in PDF is represented by an object that contains a series of samples that are stored using some compression filter.

• Image objects can be rendered on a page multiple times at any size.

Since resolution is defined as the number of pixels (or samples) per unit distance, resolution only means something for a particular rendering of an image on a page. So if you are rendering a particular image to fill the page, then the resolution in dpi is

xdpi = image_width / (pageWidthInPoints / 72.0);
ydpi = image_height / (pageHeightInPoints / 72.0);

If the image is not being rendered to the full size of the page, a complete solution is very tricky. Adobe prescribes that images should be treated as being 1x1 and that you change the page transformation matrix to determine how to render them. The means that you would need the matrix at the point of rendering the image and you would need to push the points (0,0), (0, 1), (1,0) through the matrix. The Euclidean distance between (0, 0)' and (1, 0)' will give you the width in points and the Euclidean distance between (0, 0)' and (0, 1)' will give you the height in points.

So how do you get that matrix? Well, you need the content stream for the page and you need to write a PDF interpreter that can rip the content stream and keep track of changes to the CTM. When you reach your image, you extract the CTM for it.

To do that last step should be about an hour with a decent PDF toolkit, provided you are familiar with the toolkit. Writing that toolkit is several person years of work.