Converting Many Images to One PDF
Wednesday, September 05, 2012 |I recently had the need to convert several scanned images into one multi-page PDF. While there are probably tools to help do this manually, I knew that there was a good chance I’d have to do something like this again, quite possibly with a large number of images, so I did what any good geek would do: I scripted it. In this entry, I’ll show how I went about that.
For starters, let’s take a look at the very small, simple Python script:
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#!/usr/bin/python
import os,sys, PythonMagick
from pyPdf import PdfFileReader,PdfFileWriter
if not ((len(sys.argv) > 2) and sys.argv[1].endswith('.pdf')):
print "usage: images_to_pdf.py <finalname.pdf> <image1.pdf> <imagen.pdf>"
else:
final_name = sys.argv[1]
merged = PdfFileWriter()
for file in sys.argv[2:]:
print "Processing %s..." % (file)
img = PythonMagick.Image()
img.read(file)
img.write('temp.pdf')
pdf = PdfFileReader(open('temp.pdf'))
for page in pdf.pages:
merged.addPage(page)
os.remove('temp.pdf')
merged_file = open(final_name, mode='wb')
merged.write(merged_file)
merged_file.close()
There’s not a lot to it, thanks in large part to PythonMagick and pyPDF. This script takes at least two parameters: the final name of the PDF, and at least on image file. The bulk of the work flow is this:
-
Create a
PdfFileWriterobject. This handles the heavy lifting in actually writing the PDF -
Iterate over the image file names given
-
Create an
Imageobject and read the image source into it -
Write the image to a temporary PDF file. This implicitly converts the image to a PDF.
-
Read the temporary PDF into memory via
PdfFileReader -
For each page in the temporary PDF (which should be exactly 1), add it to the real, final PDF
-
Delete the temporary PDF
-
-
Write the newly constructed PDF to disk and exit
It’s very simple, and pretty dumb (I added only enough error checking to make it work for me ;), and it may be a suboptimal use of the APIs, but it works pretty well for me. Hopefully, it will help someone else out.
My name is Jason Lee. I am a software developer living in the middle of Oklahoma. I’ve been a professional developer since 1997,
using a variety of languages, including Java, Javascript, PHP, Python, Delphi, and even a bit of C#. I currently work for Red Hat
on the WildFly/EAP team, where, among other things, I maintain integrations for some MicroProfile specs, OpenTelemetry, Micrometer,
Jakarta Faces, and Bean Validation. (Full resume 