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.

Using pip

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

Using conda

conda install -c conda-forge poppler

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/belval/example.pdf')

OR

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

OR better yet

import tempfile

with tempfile.TemporaryDirectory() as path:
     images_from_path = convert_from_path('/home/belval/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, single_file=False, output_file=str(uuid.uuid4()), 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, single_file=False, output_file=str(uuid.uuid4()), poppler_path=None)

What's new?

• single_file parameter allows you to convert the first PDF page only, without adding digits at the end of the output_file
• 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)

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, this is because of the compression.
• 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)