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The thing is that the client wants to upload a pdf with images as a way of batch processing multiple images at once.
I already looked around and out of the box PHP can't read PDF's.
What are my alternatives?
I already know the host has not installed imageMagick or any pdf library and the exec function is disabled. That's basicly leaving me with nothing to work with, I guess?
Does anyone know if there is an online service that can do this, with an api of sorts?
thanks in adv
287
AFAIK, there is no PHP module to do it. There is a command line tool, pdfimages (part of xpdf). For reference, here's how that works:
pdfimages -j source.pdf image
Which will extract all images from source.pdf as image-000.jpg, image-001.jpg, etc. Note the output format is always Jpeg.
Possible Options
Being a command line tool, you need exec (or system, passthru, any of the command executing functions built into PHP). As your environment doesn't have that, I see four options:
pdfimages as a modelpdfimages do the heavy lifting, by running it on a remote host you do controlRegarding #3, rolling your own, I don't think rolling your own, to solve a very narrow definition of requirements, would be too difficult. I seem to recall that the image boundaries in PDF are well defined: just read in the file to a boundary, cut to the end of the boundary, base64_decode, and write to a file -- repeat. However, that may be too much...
If rolling your own is too complicated, then option #4 is kind of like what Joel Spolsky describes for working with complicated Excel objects (see the numbered list under the bold heading "Let Office do the heavy work for you").
exec and curl
pdfimages
An example exchange could look like this:
GET http://www.cheaphost.com/pdfimages.php?extract=http://www.limitedhost.com/path/to/uploaded.pdf
Content-type: text/html
<html>
<body>
<ul>
<li>http://www.cheaphost.com/pdfimages.php?retrieve=ab9895v/image-000.jpg</li>
<li>http://www.cheaphost.com/pdfimages.php?retrieve=ab9895v/image-001.jpg</li>
</ul>
</body>
</html>
So your single pdfimages.php script (running on the host with the exec functionality) can both extract images, and give you access to the extracted images. When extracting, it reads a PDF you tell it, runs pdfimages on it, and gives you back a list of URL to call to retrieve the extracted images. When retrieving, it just gives you back a straight image.
You would need to deal with cleanup, perhaps the thing to do would be to delete the image after retrieval. You would also need to handle security -- don't know what's in these images, but the content might need to be wrapped in SSL and other precautions taken.
148
You can use pdfimages and install it this way:
apt install poppler-utils
Then use it this way to get all the images as PNG files:
pdfimages -j mypdf.pdf image -png
Images will be placed in the same folder under image-000.png, image-001.png, etc.
There are many options available, including some to change the output format, more information here.
I hope this helps!
2
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