Tag: PDF

PDF Batch Automation (PDF to Image and PDF Merge)

EDIT: I’ve been reminded/informed that this only works in Windows (or MS-DOS anyway) since it uses .bat files. The suggestion if you’re using other OSs is to use php (but really you can use anything) to automate the command.

I’m sure everyone is familiar with Adobe Acrobat (even if they haven’t actually used it).  It’s a nice GUI if you want to edit PDFs, but at least as far as I know, it does not do any batch or automation work.  For a digital images project, there’s a lot of automation work that needs to be done and for image to image conversion, I was using Photoshop, but then I started dealing with PDFs. Thus, it was only natural to turn to GhostScript.

PDF to Image
So, I don’t really get any credit for this, because it’s already out there and the variables are well explained.  So if you want to turn all the pages of your PDF into images, check out this Danzels Internets post. My case was a little different because I only wanted the first page turned into an image as a thumbnail for an entire file and then for an entire folder. I also prefer to do any image modification (even batch) in an image program.

@echo off
FOR %%Z IN (*.pdf) DO gswin32 -sDEVICE=jpeg -dJPEGQ=95 -dGraphicsAlphaBits=4 -dTextAlphaBits=4 -dDOINTERPOLATE -dFirstPage=1 -dLastPage=1 -sOUTPUTFILE=%%Z.jpg -dSAFER -dBATCH -dNOPAUSE %%Z

So, here the major changes are “gswin32” because I use the Windows version, and the “-dFirstPage=1 -dLastPage=1” so that the first and last page it processes is page 1. You can change the output file name too, so I changed it in such a way that it takes the original file name and adds the .jpg extension.

PDF Merge
This is kind of a side note, because I didn’t need this for my project, but I recently downloaded some articles that for some reason had each section in a separate PDF.  So, I get no credit for this one either as I got this one from Real’s How-to on Merging PDFs. I put this in here only for possible improvements of what’s presented on that site.

For the merging of PDFs in a directory, for the [merge.bat], you’re supposed to have this code:

@echo off
gswin32 -dNOPAUSE -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -sOUTPUTFILE=merged.pdf -dBATCH 1.pdf
FOR %%Z IN (*.pdf) DO IF NOT %%Z==1.pdf IF NOT %%Z==merged.pdf IF NOT %%Z==merged2.pdf call merge2.bat %%Z

Maybe it’s clear to other people, but the “1.pdf” is the name of the first pdf. I found that the subsequent ones will be added in alphanumeric order.  Also, if you happen not to change the code, it will throw an error and insert a blank page at the beginning.

PDF2Wiki Conversion Comparison

So, some people may ask, why are you trying to convert PDF to Wiki? PDF is usually the last step in the process, so just use the original document. My response would naturally be, what if you don’t have the original document?

A Two-Step Process
Through my searching and reading on the topic, it seems there is no PDF2Wiki Converter. Every site that I have read explains converting the PDF to one of: DOC, RTF, HTML, XML first then to wiki format.

PDF2HTML
I tried a number of PDF to HTML programs, but none of them worked to my satisfaction. Most of them only converted simple formatting, such as bold and italics.  Adobe has an online conversion tool. It’s better than some of the others I’ve tried as it interprets lists and such. The resulting code is rather ugly and a lot of the code would need to be stripped before using a HTML to Wiki converter. See my previous post on HTML2Wiki for a couple of tools on tidying or stripping HTML code.

PDF2DOC
I found that a much better alternative was converting the PDF to a DOC/RTF file since it’s a lot simpler and some formatting might be lost, but you won’t have a lot of needless code that might mess up your wiki page. There are a lot of online tools that provide a PDF to DOC/RTF service, however, again, they only tend to do basic formatting.  Adobe Acrobat does a really good job, because it will change lists into formatted lists (instead of normal text).  The major downside of course is that Acrobat is a paid program though there is a 30-day trial.

Conclusion
I had a lot of problems in particular with PDF to HTML, so I thought PDF to DOC/RTF is simply. Honestly though, unless you have a PDF file which is really long and has a lot of simple formatting (bold, italics, etc.), if you cannot get your hands on Acrobat, then I suggest simply copy/paste (or alternatively save as a text file) and manually formatting it in the wiki’s editing box. Of course this depends on the wiki you’re using because ones that don’t have a toolbar to help you quickly format might be a bit of a pain. Someone please let me know if you have found a better method!