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extracting bitmap images from selections?extracting bitmap images from selections?Posted Nov 30, 2004 4:55 UTC (Tue) by stevenj (guest, #421)Parent article: The Grumpy Editor's Guide to PDF Viewers One feature of Acrobat Reader on other platforms that I have missed in free PDF viewers is the ability to copy bitmap images from arbitrary rectangular selections. This is invaluable, for example, when you want to make a presentation that incorporates some figure from a PDF publication (properly cited, of course!). I don't suppose one of the free viewers above has such a feature, and I just missed it somehow? (Yes, I know I one do wonders with ImageMagick, but graphical selection of a region to export is awfully nice.)
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extracting bitmap images from selections? Posted Nov 30, 2004 6:32 UTC (Tue) by larryr (guest, #4030) [Link] I dont know if its a decent answer, but I sometimes use "convert" from ImageMagick to produce a bitmap image file for each page, something like convert file.pdf file.jpg Its obscenely resource intensive, but when its done I can just edit the jpg file using whatever bitmap editor. There is a "pdfimages" program with xpdf, but it has often not produced very useful output for me. Larry
extracting bitmap images from selections? Posted Nov 30, 2004 20:53 UTC (Tue) by smurf (subscriber, #17840) [Link] Ouch. Please, NEVER convert something that is not a continuous-tone picture to JPEG. You will get compression artefacts and it will be either bloated or ugly.
PNG is a better choice. By far.
extracting bitmap images from selections? Posted Dec 1, 2004 4:17 UTC (Wed) by Ross (subscriber, #4065) [Link] Not to mention that JPEG isn't appropriate for editing because the lossycompression artifacts build up every open-edit-save iteration, often at a superlinear rate. Yes, there are such things a lossless JPEGs but they take as much space as any other losslesss format and few programs can be told to write them.
extracting bitmap images from selections? Posted Nov 30, 2004 10:31 UTC (Tue) by pjm (subscriber, #2080) [Link] man pdfimages
extracting bitmap images from selections? Posted Nov 30, 2004 16:45 UTC (Tue) by stevenj (guest, #421) [Link] As I said, I'm aware of command-line utilities like ImageMagick, and pdfimages falls into the same boat. They have their uses, but for extracting individual portions of pages are nowhere near as convenient as being able to directly extract a graphical selection from the PDF viewer.(Yes, you can export a whole page image, then open in the GIMP or whatever and copy/save the selection. Anything is possible with enough effort; that's not what I was asking.) Sigh...apparently, this is another feature of Acrobat that is not yet implemented in free PDF viewers. (I wish the review had gone further beyond the "Can it open and print a PDF file?" level. The problem with many of these "grumpy editor" reviews is that they set the bar incredibly low compared to available proprietary software. I use, write, and love free software, but let's not close our eyes to where it is still deficient — in short, the grumpy editor is not grumpy enough for my tastes.)
extracting bitmap images from selections? Posted Nov 30, 2004 17:40 UTC (Tue) by larryr (guest, #4030) [Link] I personally do not consider selecting portions of images for copy/paste an important feature of a PDF viewer, or a web browser; I do think it is important to have software which can read PDF and produce image data which can be read by an image viewer which provides for selecting portions of images for copy/paste. Larry
extracting bitmap images from selections? Posted Nov 30, 2004 23:11 UTC (Tue) by grantingram (guest, #18390) [Link] I agree with stevenj the ability to extract pictures from PDF files is extremely useful - I spend a lot of time reading PDFs at the moment and being able to get at images from them is quite handy.
Of course one can get around it - a more direct way than converting the entire file might be to take a screenshot and edit that in the GIMP - handy if you have a twenty page document.
I'm sure there must be some bit of software that will take bitmaps of arbitary bits of screen though...
extracting bitmap images from selections? Posted Nov 30, 2004 23:43 UTC (Tue) by stevenj (guest, #421) [Link] Screenshots are not quite the same, however, because they are limited by the screen size and resolution, whereas an image-capture tool in the PDF viewer can use a higher resolution.
extracting bitmap images from selections? Posted Dec 21, 2004 2:01 UTC (Tue) by freeid (guest, #22401) [Link] Silly enough I noticed that if you copy graphics from Acrobat Reader the bitmap will only be in the resolution you are viewing it. You can print the selection to a Postscript file though and thus get the full resolution. But it doesn't seem to work all the time...
Another annoying thing is that you still can't paste an image copied from acroread into Gimp. (In Unix that is, it allegedly works in Windows.) It works with Xpaint though.
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