in reply to PDF Image Extraction

CaMelRyder,

To second some of what McDarren has already advised, CAM::PDF comes with a script called extractallimages.pl which will 'Save copies of all PDF images to a directory'.

Hope this helps.

Martin

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re^2: PDF Image Extraction
by CaMelRyder (Pilgrim) on Jul 18, 2006 at 04:38 UTC
    Thanks for the posts guys, the CAM::PDF seems to be exactly what I need. However, I'm having some pretty extreme difficulties in getting it to install. I managed to get all of the dependencies installed except for one trouble maker - Text::PDF::File. I install it over and over again and it installs successfully with no errors and no failed tests, yet everytime I try to get CAM::PDF installed it complains about Text::PDF::File not being there and attempts to install it again. Probably a versioning problem

    So I let and it bombs out during the testing phase because it can't find Text::PDF::FlateDecode. This module has completely alluded me. I can't find it anywhere. It doesn't come up in the depedency list either.

    While I've got your attention, perhaps I should elaborate a little on what my project is. I have about 100 pdfs which are technical journals on welding specifications. Welders pay alot of money for people to turn the specifications for a job into a set of legal documents so as to cover there butts if something goes wrong. This is how I view the project thus far and intend to tackle each step as a different problem:

    Step 1:
    --------
    First have to extract the journals from the pdfs(which are stored as images).

    Step 2:
    -------
    I will have to OCR the images in order to turn them into character data.

    Step 3:
    -------
    Use a form of statistical analysis to turn the character data into a searchable database, which will much easier to custom taylor to the needs of the user.

    It will be long road and I really appreciate you're help at these early steps.

    ¥peace from CaMelRyder¥
      I found a simple solution. I simply wrote a script to drive convert which is part of the ImageMagick package. It has the capability of pulling all of the images from a pdf and storing them in any format that I want. Now it's on to the OCR step. I think I'll do that one in the Java because of how easy it is to draw on the screen.
      ¥peace from CaMelRyder¥