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@hackerb9
Last active April 5, 2024 16:57
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Extract vector images from funky PDF files
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#!/bin/bash
# Most vector images can be extracted as EPS from the command line using pdftocairo + sed.
# https://superuser.com/questions/302045/how-to-extract-vectors-from-a-pdf-file/884445
# However, there was one file (created by LaTeX) that failed to extract because pdftocairo
# was rasterizing it into a bitmap, so I created a script that uses xml_grep to extract the
# image as an SVG file instead.
# b9 2019
if [[ -z "$1" ]]; then
echo "Usage: $0 <filename.pdf> [pagenumber]"
exit 1
fi
file="$1"
page="$2"
if [ "$page" ]; then
pageopt="-f $page -l $page"
fi
pdftocairo "$file" $pageopt -svg temp.svg
for surface in $(grep -o '<g id="surface[^"]*"' temp.svg | grep -o '".*"' | tr -d '"'); do
if [[ "$surface" == "surface1" ]]; then
#echo "Skipping surface1 which is entire page"
continue
fi
output="${file%.*}-$surface.svg"
echo "Extracting: $output"
(
echo "<svg>"
xml_grep --nowrap --pretty indented '//defs' temp.svg
xml_grep --nowrap --pretty indented 'g[@id="'"$surface"'"]' temp.svg
echo "</svg>"
) > $output
# Make it a valid SVG file with a proper bounding box
# You may need to `apt install librsvg2-bin` for this to work.
rsvg-convert $output -f svg -o temp.svg && mv temp.svg $output
done
if [[ -z "$output" ]]; then
echo "No additional surfaces found in this PDF."
fi
rm -f temp.svg
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