Cross-platform library for separating and converting PDFs to images?

Question

I'm currently planning an application which involves manipulating PDFs. My goal is to have a program that i can pass in a PDF as an input which then saves separated grayscale images of the colour channels that the PDF consists of as an output. This is basically a simple RIP.

I'm currently using a solution using GhostScript but i want to rewrite the application to optimise speed and usability. (GhostScript doesn't separate PDFs for example.)

Do you know of any other open source libraries that i may find useful to achieve this?

Answer 1

Did you ever try to run (I'm assuming Windows here):

 mkdir separated

 gswin32c.exe ^
    -o separated/page_%04d.tif ^
    -sDEVICE=tiffsep ^
    d:/path/to/input.pdf

(you can also try -sDEVICE=tiffsep1) and then looked at the files you've gotten in the separated sub directory?!? And this is not a case of Ghostscript separated PDFs in your mind?

The device tiffsep creates multiple output files:

1. One single 32bit composite CMYK file (tiff32nc format) per PDF page.
2. Multiple tiffgray files (each compressed with LZW) per PDF page, one for each separation.

The device tiffsep1 behaves similarly, but...

1. ...doesn't create the composite output file...
2. ...and it creates tiffg4 output files for the separations.