pdf2image

A python 2.7 and 3.4+ module that wraps pdftoppm and pdftocairo to convert PDF to a PIL Image object

How to install

First you need poppler-utils

pdftoppm and pdftocairo are the piece of software that do the actual magic. It is distributed as part of a greater package called poppler.

Windows users will have to install poppler for Windows, then add the bin/ folder to PATH.

Mac users will have to install poppler for Mac.

Linux users will have both tools pre-installed with Ubuntu 16.04+ and Archlinux. If it's not, run sudo apt install poppler-utils

Then you can install the pip package!

pip install pdf2image

Install Pillow if you don't have it already with pip install pillow

How does it work?

from pdf2image import convert_from_path, convert_from_bytes

from pdf2image.exceptions import (
    PDFInfoNotInstalledError,
    PDFPageCountError,
    PDFSyntaxError
)

Then simply do:

images = convert_from_path('/home/kankroc/example.pdf')

images = convert_from_bytes(open('/home/kankroc/example.pdf', 'rb').read())

OR better yet

import tempfile

with tempfile.TemporaryDirectory() as path:
     images_from_path = convert_from_path('/home/kankroc/example.pdf', output_folder=path)
     # Do something here

images will be a list of PIL Image representing each page of the PDF document.

Here are the definitions:

convert_from_path(pdf_path, dpi=200, output_folder=None, first_page=None, last_page=None, fmt='ppm', thread_count=1, userpw=None, use_cropbox=False, strict=False, transparent=False, poppler_path=None)

convert_from_bytes(pdf_file, dpi=200, output_folder=None, first_page=None, last_page=None, fmt='ppm', thread_count=1, userpw=None, use_cropbox=False, strict=False, transparent=False, poppler_path=None)

What's new?

Allow the user to specify poppler's installation path with poppler_path
Fixed a bug where PNGs buffer with a non-terminating I-E-N-D sequence would throw an exception
Fixed a bug that left open file descriptors when using convert_from_bytes() (Thank you @FabianUken)
fmt='tiff' parameter allows you to create .tiff files (You need pdftocairo for this)
transparent parameter allows you to generate images with no background instead of the usual white one (You need pdftocairo for this)
strict parameter allows you to catch pdftoppm syntax error with a custom type PDFSyntaxError
use_cropbox parameter allows you to use the crop box instead of the media box when converting (-cropbox in pdftoppm's CLI)
userpw parameter allows you to set a password to unlock the converted PDF (-upw in pdftoppm's CLI)

Performance tips

Using an output folder is significantly faster if you are using an SSD. Otherwise i/o usually becomes the bottleneck.
Using multiple threads can give you some gains but avoid more than 4 as this will cause i/o bottleneck (even on my NVMe SSD!).
If i/o is your bottleneck, using the JPEG format can lead to significant gains.
PNG format is pretty slow, I am investigating the issue.
If you want to know the best settings (most settings will be fine anyway) you can clone the project and run python tests.py to get timings.

Limitations / known issues

A relatively big PDF will use up all your memory and cause the process to be killed (unless you use an output folder)

Metadata

Release files for pdf2image 1.5.4

For a detailed explanation of source distributions (sdists) and built distributions (wheels), please see the package formats documentation.

Source distribution (sdist)

Source distribution for pdf2image 1.5.4
File	Size	Uploaded
pdf2image-1.5.4.tar.gz	6.3 kB	Apr 30, 2019	Details

Release files / pdf2image-1.5.4.tar.gz

Download URL	pdf2image-1.5.4.tar.gz
Size	6.3 kB
Tags	Source
SHA-256 checksum How to use checksums	`5acceba8ba00175327938219ed97d02301e3e4fcf044d4275c722eab657774f3`
BLAKE2b-256 checksum How to use checksums	`7076fdba5a266a6ce33000b8b2c107c0dec773fd68743e643531b278fa65b943`
Upload date	Apr 30, 2019
Uploaded using Trusted Publishing? What is trusted publishing?	No
Uploaded via	`twine/1.13.0 pkginfo/1.5.0.1 requests/2.20.0 setuptools/41.0.0 requests-toolbelt/0.9.1 tqdm/4.23.4 CPython/3.6.7`