(/)

digital preservation - file formats

PDF processing and

analysis with open-
source tools
06 September 2021
Plumbers Tool Box (https://www.�ickr.com/photos/
130648318@N06/42662053232) by pszz (https://
www.�ickr.com/photos/130648318@N06/) on Flickr.
Used under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0 (https://
creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/).

Over the years, I’ve been using a variety of open-

source software tools for solving all sorts of issues
with PDF documents. This post is an attempt to
(�nally) bring together my go-to PDF analysis and
processing tools and commands for a variety of
common tasks in one single place. It is largely based
on a multitude of scattered lists, cheat-sheets and
working notes that I made earlier. Starting with a
brief overview of some general-purpose PDF
toolkits, I then move on to a discussion of the
following speci�c tasks:

• Validation and integrity testing

• PDF/A and PDF/UA compliance testing
• Document information and metadata extraction
• Policy/pro�le compliance testing
• Text extraction
• Link extraction
• Image extraction
• Conversion to other (graphics) formats
• Inspection of embedded image information
• Conversion of multiple images to PDF
• Cross-comparison of two PDFs
• Corrupted PDF repair
• File size reduction of PDF with hi-res graphics
• Inspection of low-level PDF structure
• View, search and extract low-level PDF objects

How this selection came about

Even though this post covers a lot of ground, the
selection of tasks and tools presented here is by no
means meant to be exhaustive. It was guided to a
great degree by the PDF-related issues I’ve
encountered myself in my day to day work. Some of
these tasks could be done using other tools
(including ones that are not mentioned here), and in
some cases these other tools may well be better
choices. So there’s probably a fair amount of
selection bias here, and I don’t want to make any
claims of presenting the “best” way to do any of
these tasks here. Also, many of the example
commands in this post can be further re�ned to
particular needs (e.g. using additional options or
alternative output formats), and they should
probably best seen as (hopefully useful) starting
points for the reader’s own explorations.

All of the tools presented here are published as

open-source, and most of them have a command-
line interface. They all work under Linux (which is
the main OS I’m using these days), but most of them
are available for other platforms (including
Windows) as well.

PDF multi-tools
Before diving into any speci�c tasks, let’s start with
some general-purpose PDF tools and toolkits. Each
of these are capable of a wide range of tasks
(including some I won’t explicitly address here), and
they can be seen as “Swiss army-knives” of PDF
processing. Whenever I need to get some PDF
processing or analysis done and I’m not sure what
tool to use, these are usually my starting points. In
the majority of cases, at least one of them turns out
to have the functionality I’m looking for, so it’s a
good idea to check them out if you’re not familiar
with them already.

Xpdf/Poppler
Xpdf (https://www.xpdfreader.com/) and Poppler
(https://poppler.freedesktop.org/) are both PDF
viewers that include a collection of tools for
processing and manipulating PDF �les. Poppler is a
fork of this software, which adds a number of unique
tools that are not part of the original Xpdf package.
The tools included with Poppler are:

• pdfdetach: lists or extracts embedded �les

(attachments)
• pdffonts: analyzes fonts
• pd�mages: extracts images
• pd�nfo: displays document information
• pdfseparate: page extraction tool
• pdfsig: veri�es digital signatures
• pdftocairo: converts PDF to PNG/JPEG/PDF/PS/
EPS/SVG using the Cairo (https://
www.cairographics.org/) graphics library
• pdftohtml: converts PDF to HTML
• pdftoppm: converts PDF to PPM/PNG/JPEG
images
• pdftops: converts PDF to PostScript (PS)
• pdftotext: text extraction tool
• pdfunite: document merging tool

The tools in Xpdf are largely identical, but don’t

include pdfseparate, pdfsig, pdftocairo, and pdfunite.
Also, Xpdf has a separate pdftopng tool for
converting PDF to PNG images (this functionality is
covered by pdftoppn in the Poppler version). On
Debian-based systems the Poppler tools are part of
the package poppler-utils.
Pdfcpu
Pdfcpu (https://pdfcpu.io/) is a PDF processor that is
written in the Go language. The documentation
explicity mentions its main focus is strong support
for batch processing and scripting via a rich
command line. It supports all PDF versions up to
PDF 1.7 (ISO-32000).

Apache PDFBox
Apache PDFBox (https://pdfbox.apache.org/) is an
open source Java library for working with PDF
documents. It includes a set of command-line tools
(https://pdfbox.apache.org/2.0/commandline.html)
for various PDF processing tasks. Binary
distributions (as JAR (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
JAR_(�le_format)) packages) are available here
(https://pdfbox.apache.org/download.html) (you’ll
need the “standalone” JARs).

QPDF
QPDF (http://qpdf.sourceforge.net/) is “a command-
line program that does structural, content-
preserving transformations on PDF �les”.

MuPDF
MuPDF (https://www.mupdf.com/) is “a lightweight
PDF, XPS, and E-book viewer”. It includes the mutool
(https://www.mupdf.com/docs/index.html) utility,
which can do a number of PDF processing tasks.

PDFtk
PDFtk (https://www.pd�abs.com/tools/pdftk-
server/) (server edition) is a “command-line tool for
working with PDFs” that is “commonly used for
client-side scripting or server-side processing of
PDFs”. More information can be found in the
documentation (https://www.pd�abs.com/docs/
pdftk-man-page/), and the command-line examples
page (https://www.pd�abs.com/docs/pdftk-cli-
examples/). For Ubuntu/Linux Mint users, the most
straightforward installation option is the “pdftk-
java” Debian package. This is a Java fork of PDFtk1.

Ghostscript
Ghostscript (https://www.ghostscript.com/) is “an
interpreter for the PostScript language and PDF
�les”. It provides rendering to a variety of raster and
vector formats.

The remaining sections of this post are dedicated to

speci�c tasks. As you will see, many of these can be
addressed using the multi-tools listed in this section.

Validation and integrity testing

PDFs that are damaged, structurally �awed or
otherwise not conformant to the PDF format
speci�cation can result in a multitude of problems. A
number of tools provide error checking and integrity
testing functionality. This can range from limited
structure checks, to full (claimed) validation against
the �lespec. It’s important to note that none of the
tools mentioned here are perfect, and some faults
that are picked up by one tool may be completely
ignored by another one and vice versa. So it’s often a
good idea to try multiple tools. A good example of
this approach can be found in this blog post by
Micky Lindlar (https://openpreservation.org/blogs/
trouble-shooting-pdf-validation-errors-a-case-of-
pdf-hul-38/).

Validate with Pdfcpu

The Pdfcpu command-line tool has a validate

command (https://pdfcpu.io/core/validate) that

checks a �le’s compliance against PDF
32000-1:2008 (https://www.adobe.com/content/
dam/acom/en/devnet/pdf/pdfs/
PDF32000_2008.pdf) (i.e. the ISO version of PDF
1.7). It provides both a “strict” and a “relexed”
validation mode, where the “relaxed” mode (which is
the default!) ignores some common violations of the
PDF speci�cation. The command-line is:

pdfcpu validate whatever.pdf

The “strict” mode can be activated with the -m

option:

pdfcpu validate -m strict whatever.pdf

Validate with JHOVE

JHOVE (http://jhove.openpreservation.org/) is a is a
�le format identi�cation, validation and
characterisation tool that includes a module for PDF
validation. It is widely used in the digital heritage
(libraries, archives) sector. Here’s a typical
command-line example (note that you explicitly
need to invoke the PDF-hul module via the -m
option; omitting this can give unexpected results):

jhove -m PDF-hul -i whatever.pdf

Check out the documentation (https://

jhove.openpreservation.org/modules/pdf/) for more
information about JHOVE’s PDF module, and its
limitations.

Check integrity with QPDF

The --check option of QPDF (see above) performs
checks on a PDF’s overall �le structure. QPDF does
not provide full-�edged validation, and the
documentation (http://qpdf.sourceforge.net/�les/
qpdf-manual.html) states that:
 “ A �le for which –check reports no errors may
still have errors in stream data content but should
otherwise be structurally sound

Nevertheless, QPDF is still useful for detecting

various issues, especially in conjunction with the
--verbose option. Here’s an example command-line:

qpdf --check --verbose whatever.pdf

Check for Ghostscript rendering errors

Another useful technique is to process a PDF with
Ghostscript (rendering the result to a “nullpage”
device). For example:

gs -dNOPAUSE -dBATCH -sDEVICE=nullpage whatever.pdf

In case of any problems with the input �le,

Ghostscript will report quite detailed information.
As an example, here’s the output for a PDF with a
truncated document trailer:
 **** Error: An error occurred while reading an XRE
F table.
**** The file has been damaged. This may have been
caused
**** by a problem while converting or transfering t
he file.
**** Ghostscript will attempt to recover the data.
**** However, the output may be incorrect.
**** Warning: There are objects with matching obje
ct and generation
**** numbers. The output may be incorrect.
**** Error: Trailer dictionary not found.
Output may be incorrect.
No pages will be processed (FirstPage > LastPage).

**** This file had errors that were repaired or ign

ored.
**** Please notify the author of the software that
produced this
**** file that it does not conform to Adobe's publi
shed PDF
**** specification.

Check for errors with Mutool info

command
Running Mutool (part of MuPDF, see above) with
the info command returns information about
internal pdf resources. In case of broken or
malformed �les the output includes error messages,
which can be quite informative. Here’s an example
command-line:

mutool info whatever.pdf

Check for errors with ExifTool

ExifTool (https://exiftool.org/) is designed for
reading, writing and editing meta-information for a
plethora of �le formats, including PDF. Although it
does not do full-�edged validation, it will report
error and warning messages for various read issues,
and these can be useful for identifying problematic
PDFs. For example, here we use ExifTool on a PDF
with some internal byte corruption:

exiftool corrupted.pdf

Result:

ExifTool Version Number : 11.88

File Name : corrupted.pdf
Directory : .
File Size : 87 kB
File Modification Date/Time : 2022:02:07 14:36:47
+01:00
File Access Date/Time : 2022:02:07 14:37:11
+01:00
File Inode Change Date/Time : 2022:02:07 14:36:59
+01:00
File Permissions : rw-rw-r--
File Type : PDF
File Type Extension : pdf
MIME Type : application/pdf
PDF Version : 1.3
Linearized : No
Warning : Invalid xref table

In this case the byte corruption results in an “Invalid

xref table” warning. Many other errors and warnings
are possible. Check out this blog post by Yvonne
Tunnat (https://openpreservation.org/blogs/pdf-
validation-with-exiftool-quick-and-not-so-dirty/)
which discusses PDF “validation” with ExifTool in
more detail.
Other options
• VeraPDF (https://verapdf.org/) can provide useful
information on damaged or invalid PDF
documents. However, VeraPDF is primarily aimed
at validation against PDF/A (https://
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PDF/A) and PDF/UA
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PDF/UA) pro�les,
which are both subsets of ISO 32000 (https://
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PDF) (which de�nes the
PDF format’s full feature set). As a result,
VeraPDF’s validation output can be somewhat
dif�cult to interpret for “regular” PDFS (i.e.
documents that are not PDF/A or PDF/UA).
Nevertheless, experienced users may �nd
VeraPDF useful for such �les as well.

• Several online resources recommend the pd�nfo

tool that is part of Xpdf and Poppler for integrity
checking. However, while writing this post I ran a
quick test of the tool on a PDF with a truncated
document trailer2 (which is a very serious �aw),
which was not �agged by pd�nfo at all.

PDF/A and PDF/UA compliance

testing with VeraPDF
PDF/A (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PDF/A)
comprises a set of ISO-standardized pro�les that
are aimed at long-term preservation. PDF/UA
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PDF/UA) is another
ISO-standardized pro�le that ensures accessibility
for people with disabilities. These are not separate
�le formats, but rather pro�les within ISO 32000
that put some constraints on PDF’s full set of
features. VeraPDF (https://verapdf.org/) was
originally developed as an open source PDF/A
validator that covers all parts of the PDF/A
standards. Starting with version 1.18, it also added
support for PDF/UA. The following command lists al
available validation pro�les:

verapdf -l

Result:

1a - PDF/A-1A validation profile

1b - PDF/A-1B validation profile
2a - PDF/A-2A validation profile
2b - PDF/A-2B validation profile
2u - PDF/A-2U validation profile
3a - PDF/A-3A validation profile
3b - PDF/A-3B validation profile
3u - PDF/A-3U validation profile
ua1 - PDF/UA-1 validation profile

When running VeraPDF, use the -f (�avour) option

to set the desired validation pro�le. For example, for
PDF/A-1A use something like this3:

verapdf -f 1a whatever.pdf > whatever-1a.xml

And for PDF/UA:

 verapdf -f ua1 whatever.pdf > whatever-ua.xml

The documentation (https://docs.verapdf.org/cli/

validation/) provides more detailed instructions on
how to use VeraPDF.

Document information and

metadata extraction
A large number of tools are capable of displaying or
extracting technical characteristics and various
kinds of metadata, with varying degrees of detail. I’ll
only highlight a few here.

Extract general characteristics with

pd�nfo
The pd�nfo tool that is part of Xpdf and Poppler is
useful for a quick overview of a document’s general
characteristics. The basic command line is:

pdfinfo whatever.pdf

Which gives the following result:

 Creator: PdfCompressor 3.1.32
Producer: CVISION Technologies
CreationDate: Thu Sep 2 07:52:56 2021 CEST
ModDate: Thu Sep 2 07:53:20 2021 CEST
Tagged: no
UserProperties: no
Suspects: no
Form: none
JavaScript: no
Pages: 1
Encrypted: no
Page size: 439.2 x 637.92 pts
Page rot: 0
File size: 24728 bytes
Optimized: yes
PDF version: 1.6

Extract metadata with Apache Tika

Apache Tika (https://tika.apache.org/) is a Java
library that supports metadata and content
extraction for a wide variety of �le formats. For
command-line use, download the Tika-app runnable
JAR from here (https://tika.apache.org/
download.html). By default, Tika will extract both
text and metadata, and report both in XHTML
format. Tika has several command-line options that
this behaviour. A basic metadata extraction
command is (you may need to adapt the path and
name of the JAR �le)):

java -jar ~/tika/tika-app-2.1.0.jar -m whatever.pdf >

whatever.txt

Result:
 Content-Length: 24728
Content-Type: application/pdf
X-TIKA:Parsed-By: org.apache.tika.parser.DefaultParser
X-TIKA:Parsed-By: org.apache.tika.parser.pdf.PDFParser
access_permission:assemble_document: true
access_permission:can_modify: true
access_permission:can_print: true
access_permission:can_print_degraded: true
access_permission:extract_content: true
access_permission:extract_for_accessibility: true
access_permission:fill_in_form: true
access_permission:modify_annotations: true
dc:format: application/pdf; version=1.6
dcterms:created: 2021-09-02T05:52:56Z
dcterms:modified: 2021-09-02T05:53:20Z
pdf:PDFVersion: 1.6
pdf:charsPerPage: 0
pdf:docinfo:created: 2021-09-02T05:52:56Z
pdf:docinfo:creator_tool: PdfCompressor 3.1.32
pdf:docinfo:modified: 2021-09-02T05:53:20Z
pdf:docinfo:producer: CVISION Technologies
pdf:encrypted: false
pdf:hasMarkedContent: false
pdf:hasXFA: false
pdf:hasXMP: true
pdf:producer: CVISION Technologies
pdf:unmappedUnicodeCharsPerPage: 0
resourceName: whatever.pdf
xmp:CreateDate: 2021-09-02T07:52:56Z
xmp:CreatorTool: PdfCompressor 3.1.32
xmp:MetadataDate: 2021-09-02T07:53:20Z
xmp:ModifyDate: 2021-09-02T07:53:20Z
xmpMM:DocumentID: uuid:2ec84d65-f99d-49fe-9aac-bd0c1ff
f5e66
xmpTPg:NPages: 1

Tika offers several options for alternative output

formats (e.g. XMP and JSON); these are all explained
here (https://tika.apache.org/2.1.0/
gettingstarted.html) (section “Using Tika as a
command line utility”).

Extract metadata with ExifTool

ExifTool (https://exiftool.org/) is another good
option for metadata extraction. Here’s an example:

exiftool whatever.pdf

Result:

ExifTool Version Number : 11.88

File Name : whatever.pdf
Directory : .
File Size : 24 kB
File Modification Date/Time : 2021:09:02 12:23:32
+02:00
File Access Date/Time : 2022:02:07 15:04:11
+01:00
File Inode Change Date/Time : 2021:09:02 15:27:38
+02:00
File Permissions : rw-rw-r--
File Type : PDF
File Type Extension : pdf
MIME Type : application/pdf
PDF Version : 1.6
Linearized : Yes
Create Date : 2021:09:02 07:52:56
+02:00
Creator : PdfCompressor 3.1.32
Modify Date : 2021:09:02 07:53:20
+02:00
XMP Toolkit : Adobe XMP Core 5.6-c
017 91.164464, 2020/06/15-10:20:05
Metadata Date : 2021:09:02 07:53:20
+02:00
Creator Tool : PdfCompressor 3.1.32
Format : application/pdf
Document ID : uuid:2ec84d65-f99d-4
9fe-9aac-bd0c1fff5e66
Instance ID : uuid:28d0af59-9373-4
358-88f2-c8c4db3915ed
Producer : CVISION Technologies
Page Count : 1

ExifTool can also write the extracted metadata to a

variety of output formats, which is explained in the
documentation.

Extract metadata from embedded

documents
One particularly useful feature of Tika is its ability to
deal with embedded documents. As an example, this
�le (https://github.com/openpreserve/format-
corpus/blob/master/pdfCabinetOfHorrors/
digitally_signed_3D_Portfolio.pdf) is a PDF portfolio
(https://helpx.adobe.com/acrobat/using/overview-
pdf-portfolios.html), which can contain multiple �les
and �le types. Invoking Tika with the -J (“output
metadata and content from all embedded �les”)
option results in JSON-formatted output that
contains metadata (and also extracted text) for all
for all �les that are embedded in this document:

java -jar ~/tika/tika-app-2.1.0.jar -J digitally_signe

d_3D_Portfolio.pdf > whatever.json

Elaborate feature extraction with

VeraPDF
Although primarily aimed at PDF/A validation,
VeraPDF (https://verapdf.org/) can also be used as a
powerful metadata and feature extractor for any
PDF �le (including �les that don’t follow the PDF/A
or PDF/UA at all!). By default, VeraPDF is con�gured
to only extract metadata from a PDF’s information
dictionary, but this behaviour can be easily changed
by modifying a con�guration �le, which is explained
in the documentation (https://docs.verapdf.org/cli/
con�g/#features.xml). This enables you to obtain
detailed information about things like Actions,
Annotations, colour spaces, document security
features (including encryption), embedded �les,
fonts, images, and much more. Then use a command
line like4:

verapdf --off --extract whatever.pdf > whatever.xml

VeraPDF can also be used to recursively process all

�les with a .pdf extension in a directory tree, using
the following command-line (here, myDir is the root
of the directory tree):

verapdf --recurse --off --extract myDir > whatever.xml

The VeraPDF documentation (https://

docs.verapdf.org/cli/feature-extraction/) discusses
the feature extraction functionality in more detail.

Policy or pro�le compliance

assessment with VeraPDF
The results of the feature extraction exercise
described in the previous section can also be used as
input for policy-based assessments. For instance,
archival institutions may have policies that prohibit
e.g. PDFs with encryption or fonts that are not
embedded. This can also be done with VeraPDF. This
requires that the rules that make up the policy are
expressed as a machine-readable Schematron
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schematron) �le. As
an example, the Schematron �le below is made up of
two rules that each prohibit speci�c encryption-
related features:

<?xml version="1.0"?>

<sch:schema xmlns:sch="http://purl.oclc.org/dsdl/schem
atron" queryBinding="xslt">
<sch:pattern name="Disallow encrypt in trailer dic
tionary">
<sch:rule context="/report/jobs/job/featuresRe
port/documentSecurity">
<sch:assert test="not(encryptMetadata = 't
rue')">Encrypt in trailer dictionary</sch:assert>
</sch:rule>
</sch:pattern>

<sch:pattern name="Disallow other forms of encrypt

ion (e.g. open password)">
<sch:rule context="/report/jobs/job/taskResul
t/exceptionMessage">
<sch:assert test="not(contains(.,'encrypte
d'))">Encrypted document</sch:assert>
</sch:rule>
</sch:pattern>

</sch:schema>

A PDF can subsequently be tested against these

rules (here in the �le “policy.sch”) using the following
basic command-line:

verapdf --extract --policyfile policy.sch whatever.pdf

> whatever.xml
The outcome of the policy-based assessment can be
found in the output �le’s policyReport element. In the
example below, the PDF did not meet one of the
rules:

<policyReport passedChecks="0" failedChecks="1" xmln

s:vera="http://www.verapdf.org/MachineReadableReport">
<passedChecks/>
<failedChecks>
<check status="failed" test="not(encryptMetada
ta = 'true')" location="/report/jobs/job/featuresRepor
t/documentSecurity">
<message>Encrypt in trailer dictionary</me
ssage>
</check>
</failedChecks>
</policyReport>

More examples can be found in my 2017 post

Policy-based assessment with VeraPDF - a �rst
impression (/2017/06/01/policy-based-assessment-
with-verapdf-a-�rst-impression).

Text extraction
Text extraction from PDF documents is notoriously
hard. This post (https://�lingdb.com/b/pdf-text-
extraction) gives a good overview of the main
pitfalls. Tim Allison’s excellent Brief Overview of the
Portable Document Format (PDF) and Some
Challenges for Text Extraction (https://irsg.bcs.org/
informer/wp-content/uploads/
OverviewOfTextExtractionFromPDFs.pdf) provides
a more in-depth discussion, and this really is a must-
read for anyone seriously interested in this subject.
With that said, quite a few tools are available, and
below I list a few that are useful starting points.

Extract text with pdftotext

The pdftotext tool that is part of Poppler and Xpdf is
a good starting point. The basic command-line is:

pdftotext whatever.pdf whatever.txt

The tool has lots of options to �ne-tune the default

behaviour, so make sure to check those out if you’re
looking for. Note that the available options vary
somewhat between the Poppler and Xpdf versions.
The documentation of the Poppler version is
available here (https://manpages.debian.org/
stretch/poppler-utils/pdftotext.1.en.html), and here
is the Xpdf version (https://www.xpdfreader.com/
pdftotext-man.html).

Extract text with PDFBox

PDFBox is also a good choice for text extraction.
Here’s an example command (you may need to adapt
the path to the JAR �le and its name according to
the location and version on your system):

java -jar ~/pdfbox/pdfbox-app-2.0.24.jar ExtractText w

hatever.pdf whatever.txt

PDFBox also provides various options, which are

documented here (https://pdfbox.apache.org/1.8/
commandline.html#extracttext).

Extract text with Apache Tika

I already mentioned Apache Tika (https://
tika.apache.org/) in the metadata extraction section.
Tika is also a powerful text extraction tool, and it is
particularly useful for situations where text
extraction from multiple input formats is needed.
For PDF it uses the PDF parser of PDFBox (see
previous section). By default, Tika extracts both text
and metadata, and reports both in XHTML format. If
needed, you can change this behaviour with the
--text option:

java -jar ~/tika/tika-app-2.1.0.jar --text whatever.pd

f > whatever.txt

Again, an explanation of all available options is

available here (https://tika.apache.org/2.1.0/
gettingstarted.html) (section “Using Tika as a
command line utility”).

Batch processing with Tika

The above single-�le command does not scale well
for situations that require the processing of large
volumes of PDFs5. In such cases, it’s better to run
Tika in batch mode. As an example, the command
below will process all �les in directory “myPDFs”,
and store the results in output directory “tika-out”6:

java -jar ~/tika/tika-app-2.1.0.jar --text -i ./myPDF

s/ -o ./tika-out/

Alternatively, you could use TikaServer. A runnable

JAR is available here (https://tika.apache.org/
download.html). To use it, �rst start the server using:

java -jar ~/tika/tika-server-standard-2.1.0.jar

Once the server is running, use cURL (https://

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CURL) (from another terminal
window) to submit text extraction requests:

curl -T whatever.pdf http://localhost:9998/tika --head

er "Accept: text/plain" > whatever.txt

The full TikaServer documentation is available here

(https://cwiki.apache.org/con�uence/display/TIKA/
TikaServer).

Yet another option is Tika-python (https://

github.com/chrismattmann/tika-python), which is a
Python port of Tika that uses TikaServer under the
hood (resulting in similar performance).

Link extraction
When extracting (hyper)links, it’s important to make
a distinction between the following two cases:
1. Links that are encoded as a “link annotation”,
which is a data structure in PDF that results in a
clickable link
2. Non-clickable links/URLs that are just part of the
body text.

The automated extraction of the �rst case is

straightforward, while the second case depends on
some kind of lexical analysis of the body text
(typically based on regular expressions). For most
practical applications the extraction of both types is
desired.

Extract links with pdfx

The pdfx (https://www.metachris.com/pdfx/) tool is
designed to detect and extract external references,
including URLs. Its URL detection uses lexical
analysis, and is based on RegEx patterns written by
John Gruber (https://gist.github.com/gruber/
8891611). The basic command line for URL
extraction is:

pdfx -v whatever.pdf > whatever.txt

I did some limited testing with this tool in 2016. One

issue I ran into is that pdfx truncates URLS that span
more than one line (https://github.com/metachris/
pdfx/issues/21). As of 2021, this issue hasn’t been
�xed so far, which seriously limits the usefulness of
this (otherwise very interesting) tool. It’s worth
mentioning that pdfx also provides functionality to
automatically download all referenced PDFs from
any PDF document. I haven’t tested this myself.

Other link extraction tools

• Some years ago Ross Spencer wrote a link
extraction tool that uses Apache Tika (https://
github.com/httpreserve/tikalinkextract). There’s
more info in this blog post (https://
openpreservation.org/blogs/hyperlinks-in-your-
�les-how-to-get-them-out-using-
tikalinkextract/).

• Around the same time I wrote this simple

extraction script (https://gist.github.com/
bitsgalore/
aab680a9bccfc5496948b776ee06397c) that
wraps around Apache Tika and the xurl (https://
github.com/mvdan/xurls) tool. I used this to
extract URLs from MS Word documents, but this
should probably work for PDF too (I haven’t
tested this though!).

Image extraction with

pd�mages
PDFs often contain embedded images, which can be
extracted with pd�mages tool that is part of Xpdf/
Poppler. At minimum, it takes as its arguments the
name of the input PDF document, and the “image-
root” which is actually just a text pre�x that is used
to generate the name of the output images. By
default it writes its output to one of the Netpbm
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netpbm) �le formats,
but for convenience you might want to use the -png
option, which uses the PNG format instead:

pdfimages -png whatever.pdf whatever

Output images are now written as

“whatever-000.png”, “whatever-001.png”,
“whatever-002.png”, and so on. The -j , -jp2 , -jbig2

and -ccitt switches can be used to store JPEG,

JPEG2000, JBIG2 and CCITT images in their native
formats, respectively (or use -all , which combines
all of these options).

Conversion to other (graphics)

formats with pdftocairo
The pdftocairo tool (Xpdf/Poppler ) can convert a
PDF to a number of (mostly graphics) formats. The
supported output formats are PNG, JPEG, TIFF,
PostScript, Encapsulated PostScript, Scalable Vector
Graphics and PDF. As an example, the following
command will convert each page to a PNG image:

pdftocairo -png whatever.pdf

List embedded image
information with pd�mages
The pd�mages tool is also useful for getting an
overview of all embedded images in a PDF, and their
main characteristics (width, height, colour, encoding,
resolution and size). just user the -list option as
shown below:

pdfimages -list whatever.pdf

This results in a nice table like this:

page num type width height color comp bpc enc in

terp
------------------------------------------------------
-----
1 0 image 1830 2658 gray 1 1 jbig2
no
1 1 image 600 773 gray 1 8 jpx
no

page object ID x-ppi y-ppi size ratio

----------------------------------------
1 16 0 301 301 99B 0.0%
1 17 0 300 300 17.9K 4.0%

Conversion of multiple image

�les to PDF
Losslessly convert raster images to pdf
with img2pdf
The img2pdf (https://gitlab.mister-muf�n.de/josch/
img2pdf) tool converts a list of image �les to PDF.
Unlike several other tools (such as ImageMagick), it
does not re-encode the source images, but simply
embeds them as PDF objects in their original
formats. This means that the conversion is always
lossless. The following example shows how to
convert three JP2 (JPEG 200 Part 1) (http://
�leformats.archiveteam.org/wiki/JP2) images:

img2pdf image1.jp2 image2.jp2 image3.jp2 -o whatever.p

df

In the resulting PDF, each image is embedded as an

image stream with the JPXDecode (JPEG 2000)
�lter.

PDF comparison with

Comparepdf
The Comparepdf (http://www.qtrac.eu/)7 tool
compares pairs of PDFs, based on either text or
visual appearance. By default it uses the program
exit code to store the result of the comparison. The
tool’s command-line help text explains the possible
outcomes:
 “ A return value of 0 means no differences
detected; 1 or 2 signi�es an error; 10 means they
differ visually, 13 means they differ textually, and 15
means they have different page counts

For clarity I used the -v switch in the examples

below, which activates verbose output. To test if two
PDFs contain the same text, use:

comparepdf -ct -v=2 whatever.pdf wherever.pdf

If al goes well the output is either “No differences

detected” or “Files have different texts”.

To compare the visual appearance of two PDFs, use:

comparepdf -ca -v=2 whatever.pdf wherever.pdf

In this case the output either shows “No differences

detected” or “Files look different”.

Repair a corrupted PDF

Sometimes it is possible to recover the contents of
corrupted or otherwise damaged PDF documents.
This thread on Super User (https://superuser.com/
questions/278562/how-can-i-�x-repair-a-
corrupted-pdf-�le) mentions two useful options.
Repair with Ghostscript

gs -o whatever_repaired.pdf -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -dPDFSET

TINGS=/prepress whatever_corrupted.pdf

Repair with pdftocairo

A second option mentioned in the Super User
thread is pdftocairo, which is part of Xpdf and
Poppler:

pdftocairo -pdf whatever_corrupted.pdf whatever_repair

ed.pdf

It’s worth adding here that the success of any repair

action largely depends on the nature and extent of
the damage/corruption, so your mileage may very.
Always make sure to carefully check the result, and
keep a copy of the original �le.

Repair with PDFtk

Finally, pdftk can, according to its documentation
(https://www.pd�abs.com/docs/pdftk-cli-
examples/), “repair a PDF’s corrupted XREF table
and stream lengths, if possible”. This uses the
following command line:

pdftk whatever_corrupted.pdf output whatever_repaire

d.pdf
Reduce size of PDF with hi-res
images with Ghostscript
The following Ghostscript command (source here
(https://askubuntu.com/questions/113544/how-
can-i-reduce-the-�le-size-of-a-scanned-pdf-�le/
256449#256449) can be useful to reduce the size of
a large PDF with high-resolution graphics (note that
this will result in quality loss):

gs -sDEVICE=pdfwrite \
-dCompatibilityLevel=1.4 \
-dPDFSETTINGS=/ebook \
-dNOPAUSE -dQUIET -dBATCH \
-sOutputFile=whatever_small.pdf whatever_large.pdf

Reduce size of PDF with hi-res

images with ImageMagick
As an alternative to the above Ghostscript
command (which achieves a size reduction mainly by
downsampling the images in the PDF to as lower
resolution), you can also use ImageMagick (https://
imagemagick.org/)’s convert tool (https://
imagemagick.org/script/convert.php). This allows
you to reduce the �le size by changing any
combination of resolution ( -density (https://
imagemagick.org/script/command-line-
options.php#density) option), compression type
( -compress (https://imagemagick.org/script/
command-line-options.php#compress) option) and
compression quality ( -quality (https://
imagemagick.org/script/command-line-
options.php#quality) option).

For example, the command below (source here

(https://askubuntu.com/questions/113544/how-
can-i-reduce-the-�le-size-of-a-scanned-pdf-�le/
469255#469255)) reduces the size of a source PDF
by re-encoding all images as JPEGs with 70% quality
at 300 ppi resolution:

convert -density 300 \

-compress jpeg \
-quality 70 \
whatever_large.pdf whatever_small.pdf

If the -density value is omitted, convert resamples all

images to 72 ppi by default. If you don’t want that,
make sure to set the -density value to the resolution
of your source PDF (see the section “List embedded
image information with pd�mages” on how to do
that).

Even though ImageMagick’s convert tool uses

Ghostscript under the hood, it doesn’t preserve any
text (and probably most other features) of the
source PDF, so only use this if you’re only interested
in the image data!
Inspect low-level PDF
structure
The following tools are useful for inspecting and
browsing the internal (low-level object) structure of
PDF �les.

Inspect with PDFBox PDFDebugger

PDFBox includes a “PDF Debugger”, which you can
start with the following command:

java -jar ~/pdfbox/pdfbox-app-2.0.24.jar PDFDebugger w

hatever.pdf

Subsequently a GUI window pops up that allows you

to browse the PDF’s internal objects:

Screenshot of PDFBOX PDFDebugger.

Inspect with iText RUPS
The itext RUPS (https://github.com/itext/i7j-rups)
viewer provides similar functionality to PDF
Debugger. You can download a self-contained
runnable JAR here (https://github.com/itext/i7j-
rups/releases/latest) (select the “only-jars” ZIP �le).
Run it using:

java -jar ~/itext-rups/itext-rups-7.1.16.jar

Then open a PDF from the GUI, and browse your

way through its internal structure:

Screenshot of iText RUPS.

View, search and extract PDF
objects with mutool show
Mutool’s show command allows you to print user-
de�ned low-level PDF objects to stdout. A couple of
things you can do with this:

• Print the document trailer:

mutool show whatever.pdf trailer

Result:

trailer
<<
/DecodeParms <<
/Columns 3
/Predictor 12
>>
/Filter /FlateDecode
/ID [ <500AB94E8F45C149808B2EEE98528B78> <431017E49
5216040A953126BB73D0CD4> ]
/Index [ 11 10 ]
/Info 10 0 R
/Length 47
/Prev 24426
/Root 12 0 R
/Size 21
/Type /XRef
/W [ 1 2 0 ]
>>

• Print the cross-reference table:

mutool show whatever.pdf xref

 Result:

xref
0 21
00000: 0000000000 00000 f
00001: 0000019994 00000 n
00002: 0000020399 00000 n
00003: 0000020534 00000 n
::
etc

• Print an indirect object by its number:

mutool show whatever.pdf 12

Result:

12 0 obj
<<
/Metadata 4 0 R
/Pages 9 0 R
/Type /Catalog
>>
endobj

• Extract only stream contents as raw binary data

and write to a new �le:

mutool show -b whatever.pdf 151 > whatever.dat

This command is particularly useful for extracting

the raw data from a stream object (e.g. an image
or multimedia �le).

More advanced queries are possible as well. For

example, the mutool manual (https://mupdf.com/
docs/manual-mutool-show.html) gives the following
example, which shows all JPEG compressed stream
objects in a �le:

mutool show whatever.pdf grep | grep '/Filter/DCTDecod

e'

Result:

1 0 obj <</BitsPerComponent 8/ColorSpace/DeviceRGB/Fil

ter/DCTDecode/Height 516/Length 76403/Subtype/Image/Ty
pe/XObject/Width 1226>> stream
18 0 obj <</BitsPerComponent 8/ColorSpace/DeviceRGB/Fi
lter/DCTDecode/Height 676/Length 149186/Subtype/Image/
Type/XObject/Width 1014>> stream
19 0 obj <</BitsPerComponent 8/ColorSpace/DeviceRGB/Fi
lter/DCTDecode/Height 676/Length 142232/Subtype/Image/
Type/XObject/Width 1014>> stream
24 0 obj <</BitsPerComponent 8/ColorSpace/DeviceRGB/Fi
lter/DCTDecode/Height 676/Length 192073/Subtype/Image/
Type/XObject/Width 1014>> stream
25 0 obj <</BitsPerComponent 8/ColorSpace/DeviceRGB/Fi
lter/DCTDecode/Height 676/Length 141081/Subtype/Image/
Type/XObject/Width 1014>> stream

Final remarks
I intend to make this post a “living” document, and
will add more PDF “recipes” over time. Feel free to
leave a comment in case you spot any errors or
omissions!

Update on Hacker News topic

Someone created a Hacker News topic on this post
(https://news.ycombinator.com/item?
id=33145498). The comments mention some
additional tool suggestions that look useful. I might
add some of these to a future revision.

Further resources
• Moritz Mähr, “Working with batches of PDF �les”,
The Programming Historian 9 (2020) (https://
doi.org/10.46430/phen0088)
• PDF tools in Community Owned Digital
Preservation Tool Registry (COPTR) (https://
coptr.digipres.org/index.php/PDF)
• Policy-based assessment with VeraPDF - a �rst
impression (/2017/06/01/policy-based-
assessment-with-verapdf-a-�rst-impression)
• What’s so hard about PDF text extraction?
(https://�lingdb.com/b/pdf-text-extraction)
• Tim Allison, “Brief Overview of the Portable
Document Format (PDF) and Some Challenges
for Text Extraction” (https://irsg.bcs.org/
informer/wp-content/uploads/
OverviewOfTextExtractionFromPDFs.pdf)
• Yvonne Tunnat, “PDF Validation with ExifTool –
quick and not so dirty” (https://
openpreservation.org/blogs/pdf-validation-with-
exiftool-quick-and-not-so-dirty/)
• Micky Lindlar, “Trouble-shooting PDF validation
errors – a case of PDF-HUL-38” (https://
openpreservation.org/blogs/trouble-shooting-
 pdf-validation-errors-a-case-of-pdf-hul-38/)
• Hacker News topic on this post (https://
news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33145498)

Revision history
• 7 September 2021: added sections on metadata
extraction and Tika batch processing, following
suggestions by Tim Allison.
• 8 September 2021: added section on inspecting
low-level PDF structure with iText RUPS, as
suggested by Mark Stephens; added sections on
PDFtk as suggested by Tyler Thorsted; corrected
errors in pdftocairo and gs examples.
• 9 September 2021: added section on image to
PDF conversion.
• 27 January 2022: added reference to Tim
Allison’s article on PDF text extraction.
• 7 February 2022: added sections on Exiftool, and
added reference to Yvonne Tunnat’s blog post on
PDF validation with ExifTool.
• 10 October 2022: added update on and link to
Hacker News topic on this post.
• 28 November 2022: added reference to Micky
Lindlar’s blog post on trouble-shooting PDF
validation errors.
• 16 February 2023: added section on reducing
PDF �le size with ImageMagick’s convert tool.
1. The Debian package of the “original” PDFtk
software was removed from the Ubuntu
repositories (https://www.joho.se/
2020/10/01/pdftk-and-php-pdftk-on-
ubuntu-18-04-without-using-snap/) around
2018 due to “dependency issues”. ↩

2. Command line: pdfinfo whatever.pdf ↩

3. In this example output is redirected to a �le;

this is generally a good idea because of the
amount of XML output generated by
VeraPDF. ↩

4. The --off switch disables PDF/A validation.

Output is redirected to a �le (recommended
because, depending on the con�guration used,
VeraPDF can generate a lot of output). ↩

5. This is because a new Java VM is started for

each processed PDF, which will result in poor
performance. ↩

6. Of course this also works for metadata

extraction, and both text and metadata
extraction can be combined in one single
command. As an example, the following
command will extract both text and metadata,
including any embedded documents:
java -jar ~/tika/tika-app-2.1.0.jar -J --text -i ./myPDFs/ -o ./tika-out/ ↩
7. On Debian-based systems you can install it
using sudo apt install comparepdf . ↩

▸ Apache-Tika ▸ ExifTool ▸ ImageMagick

▸ JHOVE ▸ PDF ▸ preservation-risks ▸ VeraPDF

← Previous (/2021/02/24/towards-a-preservation-
work�ow-for-mobile-apps)
Next → (/2021/09/24/on-the-signi�cant-properties-of-
spreadsheets)

Comments

(https://github.com/

markee174)markee174 (https://github.com/
markee174) wrote:

We are big fans of Rups (https://github.com/

itext/i7j-rups ) for looking at the structure of
PDf �les

2021-09-08T08:50:25Z (https://github.com/
bitsgalore/bitsgalore.github.io/issues/
76#issuecomment-915044600)
 (https://github.com/

bitsgalore)bitsgalore (https://github.com/
bitsgalore) wrote:

@markee174 I just added a section on RUPS,

thanks for the suggestion!

2021-09-08T15:29:06Z (https://github.com/
bitsgalore/bitsgalore.github.io/issues/
76#issuecomment-915341461)

(https://github.com/

gettalong)gettalong (https://github.com/
gettalong) wrote:

The HexaPDF cli utility (https://

hexapdf.gettalong.org/documentation/
reference/hexapdf.1.html) falls into the same
category as qpdf, pdftk and the like.

2022-10-10T15:17:15Z (https://github.com/
bitsgalore/bitsgalore.github.io/issues/
76#issuecomment-1273470872)

(https://github.com/gollux)gollux
(https://github.com/gollux) wrote:

Some years ago, I wrote paperjam (https://

mj.ucw.cz/sw/paperjam/), which can re-arrange
pages within a PDF, make booklets, do n-up
printing, crop pages, and many other
operations. It is based on libqpdf.

2022-10-10T15:42:02Z (https://github.com/
bitsgalore/bitsgalore.github.io/issues/
76#issuecomment-1273504056)

(https://github.com/jsnmrs)jsnmrs

(https://github.com/jsnmrs) wrote:

I built PDFcheck (https://jsnmrs.github.io/

pdfcheck/) as a fast, local gut check on PDF
accessibility considerations.

Drag and drop any number of PDFs onto the

page for a client-side (local) read and report on
PDF metadata.

2022-10-12T01:23:40Z (https://github.com/
bitsgalore/bitsgalore.github.io/issues/
76#issuecomment-1275464703)
 (https://github.com/

ItsIgnacioPortal)ItsIgnacioPortal (https://
github.com/ItsIgnacioPortal) wrote:

@bitsgalore you might be interested in adding

5f0ne/pdf-examiner (https://github.com/5f0ne/
pdf-examiner): It provides an overview of the
inner �le structure of a PDF.

2022-11-18T00:36:29Z (https://github.com/
bitsgalore/bitsgalore.github.io/issues/
76#issuecomment-1319398252)

(https://github.com/atul2023-

at)atul2023-at (https://github.com/atul2023-
at) wrote:

nice…

2023-04-21T10:14:53Z (https://github.com/
bitsgalore/bitsgalore.github.io/issues/
76#issuecomment-1517606743)

(https://github.com/

paolovolterra)paolovolterra (https://
github.com/paolovolterra) wrote:

Great huge doc. Greetings But any works with

pdf like this https://www.popolarebari.it/
documenti/trasparenzaSI/47/006p.pdf

2023-05-06T04:56:37Z (https://github.com/
bitsgalore/bitsgalore.github.io/issues/
76#issuecomment-1537049405)

(https://github.com/Allasso)Allasso

(https://github.com/Allasso) wrote:

FWIW, I've found simply grep -a 'http' file.pdf

useful for �nding outside links. Haven't tested

exhaustively, so may not work on all pdfs,
depending on the app that created them.

2024-01-31T22:17:16Z (https://github.com/
bitsgalore/bitsgalore.github.io/issues/
76#issuecomment-1920071321)

(https://github.com/

mercury64)mercury64 (https://github.com/
mercury64) wrote:
 “ FWIW, I've found simply
grep -a 'http' file.pdf useful for �nding
outside links. Haven't tested exhaustively, so
may not work on all pdfs, depending on the app
that created them.

pdfgrep is the tool built on grep speci�c for pdf

�les: https://pdfgrep.org (https://pdfgrep.org/)

2024-02-29T16:18:10Z (https://github.com/
bitsgalore/bitsgalore.github.io/issues/
76#issuecomment-1971485646)

Post comment (Github) (https://github.com/

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