Extracting images from PDF and removing whitespace.

Two tools you need

1. ImageMagick (convert) - http://www.imagemagick.org/script/binary-releases.php
2. pdfimages - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pdfimages

Here the order:

  570  pdfimages ../../20120101.pdf 20120101
  571  convert *.ppm -fuzz 7% -trim ../20120101-%d.jpg

Cropping Margins Existing Template PDF with PDFTK

The key of the re-centering or re-margining is the /Mediabox reference... we have to pan the original template in PDF... ON THE UNCOMPRESSED PDF... The media box [0,0,612,792]

• Move the box up: [0 -70 612 722]
• Move the box down: [0 70 612 862]
• Move the box left: [70 0 682 792]
• Move the box right: [-70 0 542 792]

 1273  pdftk S89E.pdf output S89E.unc.pdf uncompress
 1274  sed 's/MediaBox \[0 0 612 792\]/MediaBox \[-70 0 542 812\]/g'< S89E.unc.pdf > S89.resized.pdf

Examples

 1301  sed 's/MediaBox \[0 0 612 792\]/MediaBox \[0 70 612 862\]/g'< S89E.unc.pdf > S89.resized.pdf
 1304  sed 's/MediaBox \[0 0 612 792\]/MediaBox \[0 -70 612 722\]/g'< S89E.unc.pdf > S89.resized.pdf
 1305  sed 's/MediaBox \[0 0 612 792\]/MediaBox \[70 0 682 792\]/g'< S89E.unc.pdf > S89.resized.pdf
 1306  sed 's/MediaBox \[0 0 612 792\]/MediaBox \[-70 0 542 792\]/g'< S89E.unc.pdf > S89.resized.pdf

PDFTK find pdfs and collate them oneliner

Here a oneliner to merge PDF's together that are in a sub-directory structure. (Prerequisite: installed working version of pdftk)

$ find . -type f -name '*.pdf' | 
      perl -ne 'BEGIN {  my @c=() } 
          {     push @c, $_;$_=undef; } 
                END {my $n=65; foreach (@c) 
                { chomp; $x=$x.sprintf " %c=\"%s\"", $n,$_;$y=$y. sprintf " %c", $n; $n++ 
                }; 
                  print "\npdftk $x shuffle $y output collated.pdf;\n" 
          }'

PDF::Reuse and Wide characher in compress

If you have control characters in your $content string you should remove them by forcing the encoding utf-8 for the PDF::Reuse module.

use Encode;
use PDF::Reuse;
# remove the codec formating to avoid 
# "Wide character in compress at /usr/lib/perl5/site_perl/5.10/PDF/Reuse.pm line" 
$content = encode( "utf8", $content );