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POHow can I tell the resolution of scanned PDF from within a shell script?
 

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  1. POHow can I tell the resolution of scanned PDF from within a shell script?
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    <p>I have a large collection of documents scanned into PDF format, and I wish to write a shell script that will convert each document to <a href="http://djvuzone.org/" rel="noreferrer">DjVu</a> format. Some documents were scanned at 200dpi, some at 300dpi, and some at 600dpi. Since DjVu is a pixel-based format, I want to be sure I use the same resolution in the target DjVu file as was used for the scan.</p> <p>Does anyone know what program I can run, or how I can write a program, to determine what resolution was used to produce a scanned PDF? (Number of pixels might work too as almost all documents are 8.5 by 11 inches.)</p> <hr> <p>Clarification after responses: I'm aware of the difficulties highlighted by Breton, and I'm willing to concede that the problem in general is ill-posed, but I'm not asking about <em>general</em> PDF documents. My particular documents came out of a scanner. They contain one scanned image per page, same resolution each page. If I convert the PDF to PostScript I can poke around by hand and find pixel dimensions easily; I could probably find image sizes with more work. And if in desperate need I could modify the dictionary stack that <code>gs</code> is using; long ago, I wrote an interpreter for PostScript Level 1.</p> <p>All of that is what I'm trying to avoid. </p> <hr> <p>Thanks to help received, I've posted an answer below:</p> <ol> <li>Extract the bounding box from the PDF using <code>identify</code>, taking only the output for the first page, and understanding that the units will be PostScript points, of which there are 72 to an inch.</li> <li>Extract images from the first page using <code>pdfimages</code>.</li> <li>Get height and width of image. This time <code>identify</code> will give number of pixels.</li> <li>Add the total <em>areas</em> of the images to get the number of dots squared.</li> <li>To get resolution, compute areas of bounding box in inches squared, divide dots squared by inches squared, take the square root, and round to the nearest multiple of 10.</li> </ol> <p>Full answer with script is below. I'm using it in live fire and it works great. Thanks Harlequin for <code>pdfimages</code> and Spiffeah for the alert about multiple images per page (it's rare, but I've found some).</p>
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