A python3 module that wraps the pdftoppm utility to convert PDF to a PIL Image object

pip3 install pdf2image

Install Pillow if you don't have it already with pip3 install pillow

pdftoppm is the piece of software that does the actual magic. It is distributed as part of a greater package called poppler.

Windows users will have to install poppler for Windows.

Mac users will have to install poppler for Mac.

Linux users will have pdftoppm pre-installed with the distro (Tested on Ubuntu and Archlinux) if it's not, run sudo apt install poppler-utils

from pdf2image import convert_from_path, convert_from_bytes

Then simply do:

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

OR

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')

convert_from_bytes(pdf_file, dpi=200, output_folder=None, first_page=None, last_page=None, fmt='ppm')

• userpw parameter allows you to set a password to unlock the converted PDF (-upw in the cli of pdftoppm)
• thread_count parameter allows you to set how many thread will be used for conversion.
• first_page parameter allows you to set a first page to be processed by pdftoppm (-f in the cli of pdftoppm)
• last_page parameter allows you to set a last page to be processed by pdftoppm (-l in the cli of pdftoppm)
• fmt parameter allows you to specify an output format. Currently supported formats are jpg, png, and ppm

• 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.

There are no exception thrown by pdftoppm therefore any file that couldn't be convert/processed will return an empty Image list. The philosophy behind this choice is simple, if the file was corrupted / not found, no image could be extracted and returning an empty list makes sense. (This is up for discussion)

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