suggestion for a couple of pdf tools

Question

Hi

I need a quick advice. I'm looking for a couple of tools to do these tasks

• take some images and combine them into a multipage pdf

• take a pdf and output each page as a separate image

I can't find anything free on google, apart from suggestions like "open an openoffice doc, add each image on a page and print to a pdf file" ...

Any suggestion?

Thanks a lot

Nicola Montecchio

[edit] - on windows ...

Answer 1

pdftk should be able to easily do what you're looking for.

Answer 2

PDFSharp will do what you want, but you will have to do some .NET coding to make a program to do what you want exactly.

Answer 3

If you are working in Java the itext is good, and seems to be the standard library.

Answer 4

There are some open source c# PDF libraries on CSharp-Source

Answer 5

The first requirement is easy; any of the above tools will work.

The second part is not easy. What you are describing is rendering a pdf page and saving that render as an image. I don't know if there is a simple open source solution for doing that. If the page consists only of an image, then you should go after that image and save it.

Answer 6

PDFjam I never tried on windows but apparently you can run it with cygwin

or pdftk already mentioned

Answer 7

libtiff contains a tool to convert images to pdf: tiff2pdf. Try http://gnuwin32.sourceforge.net/packages/tiff.htm for a windows copy. To make a multipage PDF you can use tiffcp first to make the TIFFs into a multipage tiff. Ghostscript and ImageMagick convert should also be able to do this for you, although libtiff is supposedly quicker. ImageMagick may be easier as you won't have to convert from your current image format to TIFF first.

For your second requirement, ghostscript, ImageMagick or NConvert can output PDF files as TIFFs. See http://stackoverflow.com/questions/75500/best-way-to-convert-pdf-files-to-tiff-files. If using ghostscript make sure you choose a suitable output device such as tiff24nc or tiff12nc and put a format template in the output filename to ensure one output file per page, e.g.

gswin32c.exe -q -dNOPAUSE -sDEVICE=tiff24nc -sOutputFile=out%d.tif input.pdf -c quit

Answer 8

Disclaimer: I work at Atalasoft

Our .NET Imaging SDK can do this. The PDF rendering part is licensed from Foxit, so it's a very high quality rasterization -- if your PDF starts as just single images, this won't matter as much, but if you need to turn vector PDF into images, it will.

Answer 9

You can also look at iTextSharp if you're doing development on the .NET Framework