PDF To Images

PDF To Images

Type: pdf-to-images  ·  Package: PDF Activities v1.1.0  ·  Output: List

Renders the pages of a PDF to PNG files. It is the bridge between a scanned PDF (one with no selectable text) and the activities that work on images: OCR and the vision ones.

How it works

It renders each requested page to a PNG inside outputDir (created if it does not exist) and returns the list of paths of the created files, in page order.

Files are named <prefix>_<page>.png with the page number padded to three digits — for example invoice_001.png, invoice_002.png. If you do not set prefix, the source PDF filename without extension is used.

The dpi decides the render quality: higher DPI improves OCR accuracy, at the cost of speed and file size. The default is 200, which is usually a good balance for documents.

Required parameters

Parameter	Editor	Description
path	expression	Path to the source PDF.
outputDir	expression	Directory where the PNG files are saved. Created if it does not exist.

Optional parameters

Parameter	Editor	Description
pages	expression	Pages to render: "all" (default) or a range such as "1-3,5,7-9".
dpi	expression	Render resolution. Default 200. Between 36 and 1200.
prefix	expression	Filename prefix for the output files. Defaults to the PDF filename without extension.

Output

Returns a List with the paths of the created PNG files, one per rendered page.

Example

Read a scanned PDF by running OCR page by page:

PDF To Images   path = = scanPath   outputDir = "C:/temp/pages"   dpi = 300   → output: images
For Each   collection = = images   itemVariable = image
 └─ activities:
      OCR Recognize File   path = = image   language = "eng"   → output: text
      Log   message = = text

Render only the first page:

PDF To Images   path = = filePath   outputDir = "C:/temp"   pages = "1"   prefix = "cover"   → output: images

Related activities

• OCR Recognize File — read the text of the generated images.
• PDF Get Words — if the PDF does have text, get the words with coordinates that line up with these images at the same DPI.
• PDF Get Text — extract text without going through images.