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PDF: problem with density

Posted: 2011-04-09T01:46:27-07:00
by CryptKeeper
I want to split multi-page PDF files so that I get one PDF file per page. But I have problems with the density, I don't know how to correctly specify it.

If I do

Code: Select all

convert file.pdf file%03.pdf
it all works but the output is (by default) 72 dpi which is too little. I've tried

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convert -density 300 file.pdf file%03.pdf
and it works insofar as the output quality is good enough. But the problem is that the output PDFs are mostly white space and the document itself is really small and placed in the lower left corner.

Principally, I could just crop the output image because when I zoom in on the small document in the lower left corner, the quality is good enough. But that can't be the solution.

So how do I correctly specify the density?

BTW: I'm using Mac OS X Leopard and ImageMagick 6.3.3 03/06/07 Q16. That's not the newest version, as I've just noticed, but I've used Unix/Terminal/Bash only for about a month so I was glad to be able to install ANY version of IM...

Thanks in advance.

Re: PDF: problem with density

Posted: 2011-04-09T09:58:45-07:00
by fmw42
I am not sure I can help. But note that IM is not a good tool for converting vector to vector as it rasterizes between. See http://www.imagemagick.org/Usage/formats/#vector

Re: PDF: problem with density

Posted: 2011-04-10T03:38:42-07:00
by CryptKeeper
fmw42 wrote:I am not sure I can help. But note that IM is not a good tool for converting vector to vector as it rasterizes between. See http://www.imagemagick.org/Usage/formats/#vector
I tried for a whole afternoon to install pdftk but didn't manage to (I somehow couldn't install cdj).

Do you know any other tools for Terminal (bash) to edit PDFs?

BTW: When I save the output of the commands in the first post to PNG instead of PDF, it works with the density.