PDF experts... Help Needed Here (Noel? Adam? Others?)
  • francis
    Posts: 10,668
    I have downloaded 650 digital organ books over the years. Early music through the baroque mostly. Not much romantic. I want to create an iPhoto library of every piece so I can quickly browse the works and then print them.

    The way I want to do this is to extract each page of every pdf file and then log it as an image in iPhoto.

    Question: Is there a way to batch this job from one folder on a Mac?
  • Adam Bartlett
    Posts: 533
    You probably don't want to use iPhoto for this. You could take a look at Adobe "Digital Editions". This is a great idea, but the software ended up working very slowly for me. I actually use "DevonThink Pro" as my digital repository, which includes thousands of scores. You can dump an entire folder into its folder system. It allows also for multiple file types. A very useful tool, although it is not free.
  • noel jones, aagonoel jones, aago
    Posts: 6,605
    I'd take all the PDF's and use COMBINE PDF's...a free mac program...to make one hugmongous file out of them, then use PREVIEW on the mac to look at them, clicking on ones and deleting.

    Combine PDF's will sort by title without messing up paging. http://www.monkeybreadsoftware.de/

    MonkeyBread • MonkeyBread • MonkeyBread • Yeah!

    I say all this only because francis has a mac.
  • francis
    Posts: 10,668
    Thanks guys.

    Adam... I presently am exporting pdf pages out as jpgs from fireworks and into iPhoto and it works quite well. each jpg maintains the file name and page number since it exports frames to files (pages to files). Unfortunately, I am running the latest system on my Mac at work (Tiger). Devon looks cool, but it requires 10.5. O well... I will revisit the idea when I upgrade to a new mac (prob within the year)

    frog... 3 macs! (two old and one new... they never die!)

    I will give this a try and let you know how it goes.

    btw... i just received my chant manuscript book... i love it! thanks tons!
  • noel jones, aagonoel jones, aago
    Posts: 6,605
    Glad you like the book. Fun to carry it around and have people ask...."what's that?"

    What dpi are you using for the jpgs?
  • francis
    Posts: 10,668
    Fireworks defaut export is 72dpi at actual size and 80% compression on jpg. Average 150k per file.
  • Adam WoodAdam Wood
    Posts: 6,451
    72dpi won't print text very well in my experience.
    And jpg is intended for photos, not text and line art (like music).

    I'm really curious about the reason for doing this- it seems weird to me.
  • francis
    Posts: 10,668
    Adam

    This is not for printing. Just browsing the entire library. I can browse 10,000 pages very quickly, or do a search on a composer or title in iPhoto and it will parse 10,000 pages instantly and present thumbnails. Once the file name is presented I go to the correct pdf and print! Voila!

    I have taken all the pdfs I have (650 so far) and I create metadata by using this naming convention:

    composerlastnameTitleOfPiece.pdf

    Then when I export all the pages the file names become thus:

    bachJsOrganWorksVol1_f1.jpg
    bachJsOrganWorksVol1_f2.jpg
    bachJsOrganWorksVol1_f3.jpg
    etc.

    The _f# designation becomes the page number of the specific pdf file so it is almost instantaneous to locate the pdf file and page by viewing a searchable database of jpgs.
  • francis
    Posts: 10,668
    WOW!

    Thanks Noel. With that app, when I dragged all 650 pdf files into the window, it split the entire library into individual pages with the preview window showing each page. This blows my previous method out of the water. It distilled the entire library into that format in about 4 seconds!
  • noel jones, aagonoel jones, aago
    Posts: 6,605
    Amazing the things that are out there for free. I have found a use for this every week. Note that you can add blank pages in it as well.
  • francis
    Posts: 10,668
    This is a very cool app! Haven't seen new coolness for a long time.
  • noel jones, aagonoel jones, aago
    Posts: 6,605
    There is also one that flows multiple pages of documents into InDesign that is very useful.
  • JMJ_coder
    Posts: 19
    A really good program for this (and many, many other things) is ImageMagick (http://www.imagemagick.org/). Once this is installed you could go to a shell and do:

    convert mypdf.pdf myjpg.jpg

    If the pdf is 5 pages long, you'll have files myjpg-0.jpg, myjpg-1.jpg, myjpg-2.jpg, myjpg-3.jpg, myjpg-4.jpg. With a little scripting, you could make this organize it in quite a number of different ways (not to mention do batch processing).
  • francis
    Posts: 10,668
    JMJ... ah... a BASH user... on MAC?

    Thnx for link.
Add a Comment