A python (3.5+) module that wraps pdftoppm and pdftocairo to convert PDF to a PIL Image object

pip install pdf2image

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.

Most distros ship with pdftoppm and pdftocairo. If they are not installed, refer to your package manager to install poppler-utils

1. Install poppler: conda install -c conda-forge poppler
2. Install pdf2image: pip install pdf2image

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, grayscale=False, size=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, grayscale=False, size=None)

Use the mattermost chat to ask questions on the helpdesk and get direct support.

• size parameter allows you to define the shape of the resulting images (-scale-to in pdftoppm CLI)
  • size=400 will fit the image to a 400x400 box, preserving aspect ratio
  • size=(400, None) will make the image 400 pixels wide, preserving aspect ratio
  • size=(500, 500) will resize the image to 500x500 pixels, not preserving aspect ratio
• grayscale parameter allows you to convert images to grayscale (-gray in pdftoppm CLI)
• 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)

• 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.

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