I've been looking for a solution to this for a while now. So far I've been using ImageMagick's convert, and it works in many cases. But there are very many PDF files it can't read (or ghostscript can't read), or reads incorrectly.

Unfortunately I can't be more precise as to the reason why it fails, cause it mostly just breaks up without reason. And if the PDF is too big (filesize or pages, doesn't matter) ImageMagick uses literally gigabytes of memory and I usually kill it...

Basically what I'm looking for is a console application that can read all PDF files out there (which programs like Xpdf seem to be able to do) and convert them to JPEGs (and split them into many small PDFs, too, if possible). Is there anything like that? Or is there some way to force ghostscript to read all files?

TIA

Not sure whether it will work with YOUR PDFs, but I had good
results with it in the past ... have you looked at pdftk? It
allows all sorts of manipulations on PDF, including splitting
large multi-page ones into individual files per page. That
may help with some of your problems.



Cheers,
Tink

You could try pdfimages from the poppler library, which is based on xpdf. Though if you're problem is with postscript I'm not sure this will help any.

maybe pdftoppm and then conver to jpg.

do man pdftoppm

man ppmtojpeg