PDF Images

HiRISE camera drawing

The HiRISE camera is one of the instruments on the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. I'm looking for pictures of it, not pictures taken by the camera, but pictures of the camera, and I'm not finding much. I finally locate a PDF file with some images, but how do I get the images out of the PDF? I'm running Linux on my PC, so no Adobe Acrobat here, though I wouldn't want to use it even if I could. Adobe is part of the mainstream PC business that seems to revolve around adding more cute tricks so they can sell upgrades. Those cute tricks might be useful to some people, but they add more complexity and reduce reliability, not to mention requiring frequent, time consuming updates. No tanks. [end rant].

I have Okular, a fancy PDF file viewer that works on Linux, and I can use the selection tool to copy images and save them to a file. I used it to extract some of the images from the PDF file of NSA security posters. It works, but it is time consuming and tedious. Besides, in any PDF file that isn't just a photo copy of a paper document, the images ought to be objects within the file. Any good PDF editor should be able to extract them. Acrobat might be able to do that but I'll never know.

This morning I looked around and found PDFaid. I tried it on my target PDF file and it worked, sort of. It extracted some of the images, but the one I really wanted came out as a bunch of 10 pixel high strips. I supposed you could stitch them together if you were patient, but that's not me. I used Okular for that one.