A python3 module that wraps the pdftoppm utility to convert PDF to the PIL image formatt

pip install pdf2image

Windows users will have to install pdftoppm

Linux users will have pdftoppm pre-installed with the distro (Tested on Ubuntu and Archlinux)

from pdf2image import convert_from_path, convert_from_bytes

Then simply do:

images = convert_from_path('/home/kankroc/example.pdf')

OR

images = convert_from_bytes(open('/home/kankroc/example.pdf', 'rb').read())

images will be a list of PIL Image representing each page of the PDF document.

There are no exception thrown by pdftoppm therefore any file that couldn't be convert/processed will return an empty Image list. The philosophy behind this choice is simple, if the file was corrupted / not found, no image could be extracted and returning an empty list makes sense. (This is up for discussion)

• A relatively big PDF will use up all your memory and cause the process to be killed