Get the layout mode (landscape or portrait) of a pdf from php/linux

Question

Given a PDF, how can one get the layout mode of a PDF (or relative width/height) using a PHP lib or linux command line tool?

Using http://www.tecnick.com/public/code/cp_dpage.php?aiocp_dp=tcpdf which can set this variable on new PDFs, but for existing pdfs from adobe.

Thought of converting pdfs to ps, or using gs in some other way - like converting it to an image first, and getting the width and height of that. Is this the best way?

Answer 1

The solution I'm using is to use ghostscript to print the first page to an image, then getting the image dimensions

$cmd = 'gs -dSAFER -dBATCH -dNOPAUSE -dFirstPage=1 -dLastPage=1 -sDEVICE=png16m -r400 -dTextAlphaBits=4 -dGraphicsAlphaBits=4 -sOutputFile="'.$complete_file_path.'/p%d.png" "'.$complete_file_path.'/'.$this->pdffilename.'"';
        $result = $this->proc( $cmd );
        list($width, $height, $type, $attr) = getimagesize($complete_file_path.'/'.$pngfilename);

Answer 2

You cannot always rely on the results from the first page to be the same for all the rest. I've seen enough mixed format PDFs out there in the wild to not want to base any code on that assumption.

A more reliable way to determine the media sizes for each page (and even each one of the embedded {Trim,Media,Crop,Bleed}Boxes) is the commandline tool pdfinfo.exe (part of the XPDF tools from http://www.foolabs.com/xpdf/download.html). You can run the tool with the "-box" parameter and tell it with "-f 3" to start at page 3 and with "-l 8" to stop processing at page 8.

Example output:

C:\downloads>pdfinfo -box -f 1 -l 3 _IXUS_850IS_ADVCUG_EN.pdf
Creator:        FrameMaker 6.0
Producer:       Acrobat Distiller 5.0.5 (Windows)
CreationDate:   08/17/06 16:43:06
ModDate:        08/22/06 12:20:24
Tagged:         no
Pages:          146
Encrypted:      no
Page    1 size: 419.535 x 297.644 pts
Page    2 size: 297.646 x 419.524 pts
Page    3 size: 297.646 x 419.524 pts
Page    1 MediaBox:     0.00     0.00   595.00   842.00
Page    1 CropBox:     87.25   430.36   506.79   728.00
Page    1 BleedBox:    87.25   430.36   506.79   728.00
Page    1 TrimBox:     87.25   430.36   506.79   728.00
Page    1 ArtBox:      87.25   430.36   506.79   728.00
Page    2 MediaBox:     0.00     0.00   595.00   842.00
Page    2 CropBox:    148.17   210.76   445.81   630.28
Page    2 BleedBox:   148.17   210.76   445.81   630.28
Page    2 TrimBox:    148.17   210.76   445.81   630.28
Page    2 ArtBox:     148.17   210.76   445.81   630.28
Page    3 MediaBox:     0.00     0.00   595.00   842.00
Page    3 CropBox:    148.17   210.76   445.81   630.28
Page    3 BleedBox:   148.17   210.76   445.81   630.28
Page    3 TrimBox:    148.17   210.76   445.81   630.28
Page    3 ArtBox:     148.17   210.76   445.81   630.28
File size:      6888764 bytes
Optimized:      yes
PDF version:    1.4