How to Extract Images from PDF Documents in Ubuntu/Linux

PDF (Portable Document Format) documents are a handy way to present text and images to others knowing they’ll look the same no matter what word processor or operating system they use. Basically, they’re a snapshot of a document, so saving images from them can be a hassle, even if your viewer lets you right-click them and save them as files. There are a few programs around that can do this for you, but it’s actually much easier and faster doing this from the command-line.

The pdfimages command is part of poppler-utils, which should already be installed on your system (sudo apt-get install poppler-utils in the terminal if it isn’t). To extract the images from a PDF, just open a terminal in the folder with the document, and run a command like the following:

pdfimages -j Cool-Pix-of-2011.pdf cool2011

Note that when extracting from files with spaces in the name, you will need to enclose the filename in single quotes. Eg:

pdfimages -j 'Cool Pix of 2011.pdf' cool2011

The text at the end of the command is what each extracted image will begin with, so the resulting filenames will be cool2011-000.jpg onwards (note that numbering starts at 000, not 001). Once again, if you’d prefer to have spaces in the target names, for example to mirror the name of the original PDF, then enclose that in single quotes too (eg: 'Cool Pix of 2011 ' – note the space at the end, just to provide a bit more separation between '2011' and the hyphen preceding the automatic numbering; this is of course optional, and you can pretty much do what you want). Eg:

pdfimages -j 'Cool Pix of 2011.pdf' 'Cool Pix of 2011 '

Your pictures will now be extracted into the folder with names starting with Cool Pix of 2011 -000.jpg.

Also, the -j option is to save the images in the .jpg format, otherwise they will be saved in .ppm (Portable Pixmap) format, with each file being over a megabyte. This can mean, for example, that an 18Mb document with 120 images can extract to 154Mb of files, whereas exporting them as .jpg ends up with a total of 18Mb, just like the original document. Of course, if you’d prefer to save them as .ppm images, simply leave out the -j option.

If you would like to include the page numbering in the file names, add the -p option. Eg:

pdfimages -j -p 'Cool Pix of 2011.pdf' 'Cool Pix of 2011 '

Lastly, don’t worry if you see the following in the terminal for each image being extracted:

Error (18468081): Missing ‘endstream’
Error: Unknown operator ‘endstream’
Error: Unknown operator ‘endobj’

You shouldn’t see that with every PDF you try to extract from, but even when you do you should find the target images have been created without issue.

Extra Notes:

For more options for this command, run pdfimages -?. For example, you can specify a start and end page, but personally I find it easier to just extract the whole document and delete any images I don’t want afterwards. But if you need to specify a password, you will find the option here.

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Creating Windows Text Files in Ubuntu: How to Save as MS-DOS End-Of-Line in Gedit

A Quick Intro to End-Of-Line Conventions

Most people don’t realise that when they hit the Enter key to create a new paragraph in a text file, something very different is going on behind the scenes in the three major operating systems: Windows, Macintosh and Linux. The “end-of-line delimiter” (often expressed as “End-Of-Line“, “End of Line“, or just “EOL“) – which some of you know as the “line break” or “newline” – is a special character used to designate the end of a line within a text file.

UNIX-based operating systems (like all Linux distros and BSD derivatives) use the line feed character (\n or <LF>), “classic” Mac OS uses a carriage return (\r or <CR>), while DOS/Windows uses a carriage return followed by a line feed (\r\n or <CR><LF>). Now that Mac OS X is based on FreeBSD‘s file system, it follows the UNIX convention.

Now, the reason most people don’t know about all this is because nobody really should have to. But while users of Linux distros and Mac OS can open Windows text files in basically any available editor and not even know the difference, the same can’t be said for Windows users opening files created in one of the other operating systems.

If you type up a simple text file in Ubuntu and save it in the default “Unix/Linux” format, in Windows it will appear as one continuous paragraph, with black squares where the line breaks (or new paragraphs) should be. While you can open the file in a more advanced text editor (or proper word processor) to view it as it should look, others you’ve sent it to are just likely to double-click it and let it open in Notepad (which can only handle MS-DOS EOL).

But you can save text files as Windows EOL easily with Gedit, as well as convert to that from UNIX via the terminal, so hopefully the following guide will be of use.

For more detailed info on End-Of-Line, go to the Wikipedia page.

And if you find the editor you’re using to display Windows files in Ubuntu shows ^M instead of a line break (not very likely with even the most lightweight text editors, but something you’ll probably come across if you display the text in a terminal), check out how to convert to Unix/Linux.

Saving Windows Text Files in Text Editor (Gedit)

It’s actually very easy to create text files with Windows EOL in Ubuntu using the default Text Editor, Gedit. When saving a file, go to Line Ending in the dialogue box and choose Windows instead of the default Unix/Linux. For files that were previously created, you can open them in Gedit and use Save As… to convert them (or save copies with the correct EOL).

As you can see, that’s pretty easy, but for more than one or two files, it is way too much work, so check out how to batch-convert multiple files via the terminal.

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Creating Windows Text Files in Ubuntu: How to Convert UNIX End-Of-Line to MS-DOS Format

A Quick Intro to End-Of-Line

Most people don’t realise that when they hit the Enter key to create a new paragraph in a text file, something very different is going on behind the scenes in the three major operating systems: Windows, Macintosh and Linux. The “end-of-line delimiter” (often expressed as “End-Of-Line“, “End of Line“, or just “EOL“) – which some of you know as the “line break” or “newline” – is a special character used to designate the end of a line within a text file.

UNIX-based operating systems (like all Linux distros and BSD derivatives) use the line feed character (\n or <LF>), “classic” Mac OS uses a carriage return (\r or <CR>), while DOS/Windows uses a carriage return followed by a line feed (\r\n or <CR><LF>). Now that Mac OS X is based on FreeBSD‘s file system, it follows the UNIX convention.

Now, the reason most people don’t know about all this is because nobody really should have to. But while users of Linux distros and Mac OS can open Windows text files in basically any available editor and not even know the difference, the same can’t be said for Windows users opening files created in one of the other operating systems.

If you type up a simple text file in Ubuntu and save it in the default “Unix/Linux” format, in Windows it will appear as one continuous paragraph, with black squares where the line breaks (or new paragraphs) should be. While you can open the file in a more advanced text editor (or proper word processor) to view it as it should look, others you’ve sent it to are just likely to double-click it and let it open in Notepad (which can only handle MS-DOS EOL).

But you can save text files as Windows EOL easily with Gedit, as well as convert to that from UNIX via the terminal, so hopefully the following guide will be of use.

For more detailed info on End-Of-Line, go to the Wikipedia page.

If you’d like a more WYSIWYG approach, check out how to save and convert via Gedit.

And if you find the editor you’re using to display Windows files in Ubuntu shows ^M instead of a line break (not very likely with even the most lightweight text editors, but something you’ll probably come across if you display the text in a terminal), check out how to convert to Unix/Linux.

Converting Linux EOL to Windows via the Terminal

It’s easy enough to create new text files with Windows EOL in Ubuntu using the default Text Editor (Gedit), but what if you’ve created a whole bunch with the default Unix/Linux EOL and need to convert them for Windows users? Well, you can actually open them in Gedit and use Save As… to save over them (or to create copies), but for more than a couple of files this would be the long, complicated solution.

By far the quickest and easiest approach is to convert the offending files via the command-line. This way, you could batch-convert hundreds of such files at once, not have to do them individually.
There are actually quite a few ways to do this, but we’ll look at a couple of tiny packages you can install, and the related commands to use.

The first – the tofrodos package – is undoubtedly the most widely-used, so we’ll look at that in detail – especially since many of the guides out there are outdated, since the commands it contains have been renamed.

The second is a little package called flip, and since it’s tiny and won’t cause any issues, it’s worth installing as a backup (just in case. I found it useful after trying to get tofrodos going on a new system, before I found out the commands were changed).

There is no actual command tofrodos, as it is just the package that contains the commands todos and fromdos. Currently, the vast majority of online guides will list the commands as unix2dos and dos2unix, but as the developer states:

With this release the symlinks “unix2dos” and “dos2unix” are dropped from the package. This will allow the introduction of the original dos2unix package, which also supports conversion to MacOS style files.

So now you can choose to use either todos (to convert to Windows) and fromdos (to convert to Linux), or just fromdos with options (fromdos -u to convert to DOS, and fromdos -d to convert to UNIX, though obviously the -d option really isn’t needed, as it is the default behaviour for the fromdos command).

We’ll use todos, as it is easier to remember, and show how to alter a single file, or all text files in a given folder. When you’re ready to proceed, open a terminal in the folder containing the text file(s) and use one of the following commands (note that for the purpose of illustration, the .txt suffix is used, but you can specify any other extension for your text files).

To convert to DOS/Windows format:

Single file (remember to replace filename.txt with the actual name of the file)

todos filename.txt

All text files in a folder (if the extension differs to .txt, simply replace it in the command)

todos *.txt

Similarly, flip is easy to use:

flip -m filename.txt (or flip -m *.txt for multiple files).

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How to Convert Windows/DOS Text Files to Linux/UNIX Format

A Quick Intro to End-Of-Line

Most people don’t realise that when they hit the Enter key to create a new paragraph in a text file, something very different is going on behind the scenes in the three major operating systems: Windows, Macintosh and Linux. The “end-of-line delimiter” (often expressed as “End-Of-Line“, “End of Line“, or just “EOL“) – which some of you know as the “line break” or “newline” – is a special character used to designate the end of a line within a text file.

UNIX-based operating systems (like all Linux distros and BSD derivatives) use the line feed character (\n or <LF>), “classic” Mac OS uses a carriage return (\r or <CR>), while DOS/Windows uses a carriage return followed by a line feed (\r\n or <CR><LF>). Now that Mac OS X is based on FreeBSD‘s file system, it follows the UNIX convention.

Now, the reason most people don’t know about all this is because nobody really should have to. But while users of Linux distros and Mac OS can open Windows text files in basically any available editor and not even know the difference, the same can’t be said for Windows users opening files created in one of the other operating systems.

If you type up a simple text file in Ubuntu and save it in the default “Unix/Linux” format, in Windows it will appear as one continuous paragraph, with black squares where the line breaks (or new paragraphs) should be. While you can open the file in a more advanced text editor (or proper word processor) to view it as it should look, others you’ve sent it to are just likely to double-click it and let it open in Notepad (which can only handle MS-DOS EOL).

Occasionally, the reverse is the issue, but you can convert Windows text files to UNIX easily with Gedit, as well as convert them via the terminal, so hopefully the following guide will be of use.

For more detailed info on End-Of-Line, go to the Wikipedia page.

Or if you’re wanting to do the reverse, check out how to convert to Windows format via the terminal and with Save As… in Gedit.

Converting Windows EOL to Linux via the Terminal

If you find the text editor you’re using to display Windows files in Ubuntu shows ^M instead of a line break (not very likely with even the most lightweight text editors, but something you’ll probably come across if you display the text in a terminal), don’t worry – just convert them to Unix/Linux format.

While you can actually open them in Gedit and use Save As… to save over them (or to create copies) in the correct format, for more than a couple of files this would be the long, complicated solution.

By far the quickest and easiest approach is to convert the offending files via the command-line. This way, you could batch-convert hundreds of such files at once, not have to do them individually.
There are actually quite a few ways to do this, but we’ll look at a couple of tiny packages you can install, and the related commands to use.

The first – the tofrodos package – is undoubtedly the most widely-used, so we’ll look at that in detail – especially since many of the guides out there are outdated, since the commands it contains have been renamed.

The second is a little package called flip, and since it’s tiny and won’t cause any issues, it’s worth installing as a backup (just in case. I found it useful after trying to get tofrodos going on a new system, before I found out the commands were changed).

There is no actual command tofrodos, as it is just the package that contains the commands todos and fromdos. Currently, the vast majority of online guides will list the commands as unix2dos and dos2unix, but as the developer states:

With this release the symlinks “unix2dos” and “dos2unix” are dropped from the package. This will allow the introduction of the original dos2unix package, which also supports conversion to MacOS style files.

So now you can choose to use either todos (to convert to Windows) and fromdos (to convert to Linux), or just fromdos with options (fromdos -u to convert to DOS, and fromdos -d to convert to UNIX, though obviously the -d option really isn’t needed, as it is the default behaviour for the fromdos command).

We’ll use fromdos, as it is easier to remember, and show how to alter a single file, or all text files in a given folder. When you’re ready to proceed, open a terminal in the folder containing the text file(s) and use one of the following commands (note that for the purpose of illustration, the .txt suffix is used, but you can specify any other extension for your text files).

To Convert to UNIX/Linux via Terminal:

Single file (remember to replace filename.txt with the actual name of the file)

fromdos filename.txt

All text files in a folder (if the extension differs to .txt, simply replace it in the command)

fromdos *.txt

Similarly, flip is easy to use:

flip -u filename.txt (or flip -u *.txt for multiple files)

Converting Windows EOL to Linux with Gedit

It’s actually very easy to convert text files with Windows EOL to Unix/Linux in Ubuntu using the default Text Editor, Gedit. Simply open the files, choose Save As…, go to Line Ending in the dialogue box and choose Unix/Linux instead of Windows. While that is easy enough, for more than one or two you’d really want to save yourself some time and hassle and perform a batch-conversion via the terminal.

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Did this information make your day? Did it rescue you from hours of headache? Then please consider making a donation via PayPal, to buy me a donut, beer, or some fish’n’chips for my time and effort! Many thanks!

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How to Restore Your Windows Fonts in Ubuntu (Without Installing Them)

Whenever you freshly install an OS – be it Ubuntu or Windows – your previous collection of fonts can’t be expected to just suddenly appear there. But it’s really quick and simple to get them back, and you won’t even need to reboot before you can start using them.

All you will be doing is copying files from a source folder to a destination folder, which is just a basic bit of file management. First, locate your original fonts folder on your Windows partition, which should be C:\Windows\Fonts\. Next, you will need to create a hidden folder in your home folder on your Ubuntu partition, which you can do by entering the following command into a terminal:

mkdir ~/.fonts

If you’re wondering why a folder had to be created, especially since the system has fonts installed (so they have to be residing somewhere already), the short answer is just to make things easier for you. Fonts that come with the system, and a few that get installed by programs, are found in /usr/share/fonts – which, being a protected system folder, means you’ll need to ask for permission before you can do anything with it (like copy files into it).

The new .fonts folder, while being hidden (denoted by it starting with a period), is owned by you, so you can drag files in and out without being told you don’t have the appropriate permissions for that task. And of course Ubuntu will immediately recognise that you have a fonts folder of your own, and incorporate those with the ones already installed.

Once you have a folder window open for both source and destination, simply select your fonts and drag them from your Windows partition to the new fonts folder, and copies will be placed there. At this point, you can either choose to be selective, dragging over only those you will actually use from the collection that has accumulated over the years, or just select them all with Ctrl+A.

If you’re not sure about certain fonts, as filenames are shown, not font names, you can double-click those for a preview, then click the Install Font button at the bottom right.

Once you’re finished, the fonts are ready to use. If you had a word processor or similar open while doing this, the fonts won’t be recognised yet, so simply close and reopen it, and you’ll see all your fonts there. Note that this will also work with Windows programs running under Wine, meaning next time you run Adobe Photoshop or what have you, all the fonts accessible in Ubuntu will be available to it.

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If you’d like to do all this the easiest way – via the terminal – a command like the following will do the trick:

mkdir ~/.fonts && cp -rT /media/Windows/Windows/Fonts/ ~/.fonts

You will probably need to change the path of the source, depending on where it is mounted (in this example, it assumes your Windows partition is mounted as /media/Windows). Also, if there are spaces in the path (like if the mount point is /media/Windows XP), you will need to enclose that path in single quotes, and make note of any case issues (if C:\Windows is actually C:\WINDOWS, you will need to put it as such). Here is a revised command taking all those into consideration:

mkdir ~/.fonts && cp -rT '/media/Windows XP/WINDOWS/Fonts/' ~/.fonts

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How to Show Hidden Files & Folders

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Pastebin Nautilus Extension/Plugin: Send Text Clips to the Web in Ubuntu

A new little extension for Ubuntu‘s file manager is nautilus-pastebin, which is a script written in Python that allows users to upload text-only files to an online pastebin service by simply right-clicking them. Each scrap of text has its own unique URL, which is placed in the clipboard ready for pasting into your web browser (or email if wanting to share the text with the recipient).

Once installed, all you have to do is right-click a text file, choose Pastebin from the context menu, and your text clip is uploaded. A notification should pop up under your system tray informing you where it has been saved to (as mentioned, the address will now be in memory ready for pasting).

To view it, simply paste the URL into your browser’s address bar.

If this seems like something you can do with, install the forementioned package via Synaptic, or enter the following into a terminal:

sudo apt-get install nautilus-pastebin

Users can also customise the extension’s behaviour by using nautilus-pastebin-configurator, an easy-to-use configuration tool that is also installed (just paste the command into a terminal or Alt+F2).

With it you can make the URL automatically open in your web browser, turn the notification on or off, force a confirmation message to appear before uploading the text, and change the pastebin service to another in the list.

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Click here for more Nautilus Extensions!

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