Converting PDF to PNG with Python (without pdf2image)

PyMuPDF supports pdf to image rasterization without requiring any external dependencies.

Sample code to do a basic pdf to png transformation:

import fitz  # PyMuPDF, imported as fitz for backward compatibility reasons
file_path = "my_file.pdf"
doc = fitz.open(file_path)  # open document
for i, page in enumerate(doc):
    pix = page.get_pixmap()  # render page to an image
    pix.save(f"page_{i}.png")

Here is a snippet that generates PNG images of arbitrary resolution (dpi):

# note: pymupdf can be imported as fitz 
# for backward compatibility (use `import pymupdf` in new code)
import fitz 
file_path = "my_file.pdf"
dpi = 300  # choose desired dpi here
zoom = dpi / 72  # zoom factor, standard: 72 dpi
magnify = fitz.Matrix(zoom, zoom)  # magnifies in x, resp. y direction
doc = fitz.open(fname)  # open document
for page in doc:
    pix = page.get_pixmap(matrix=magnify)  # render page to an image
    pix.save(f"page-{page.number}.png")

Generates PNG files name page-0.png, page-1.png, ... By choosing dpi < 72 thumbnail page images would be created.

Try pypdfium2 Python package that comes with PDFium (maintained by Google) binaries. According to its README, it is one of the rare Python libraries that are capable of PDF rendering while not being covered by copyleft licenses (such as the GPL).

It can be used for rendering PDF pages into PIL format or NumPy format, and you have to install those packages separately.

Below is example usage. For the force_bitmap_format parameter you can alternatively provide, for example, pdfium.raw.FPDFBitmap_Gray if you only need a grayscale image or pdfium.raw.FPDFBitmap_BGRA if you also need the alpha channel.

Here are the docs of PdfPage.render().

import pypdfium2 as pdfium

pdf = pdfium.PdfDocument("example.pdf")
page_ix = 0
page = pdf.get_page(page_ix)
bitmap = page.render(
    scale=1,
    rotation=0,
    rev_byteorder=True,  # To get RGB instead of BGR
    force_bitmap_format=pdfium.raw.FPDFBitmap_BGR,
)

page_img_pil = bitmap.to_pil()
page_img_pil.save(f"pdf_page_{page_ix}.png")
print(f"PIL image size: {page_img_pil.size}, PIL image mode: {page_img_pil.mode}")

page_img_np = bitmap.to_numpy()
print(f"NumPy image size: {page_img_np.shape}, NumPy image data type: {page_img_np.dtype}")

import fitz

input_pdf = r"Samples\104295.pdf"

output_jpg = r"Output\104295.jpg"

#The code splits the first page of pdf and converts to jpeg
def split_and_convert(pdf_path, output_path):
    doc = fitz.open(pdf_path)
    page = doc.load_page(0)
    pix = page.get_pixmap()
    pix.save(output_path, "jpeg")
    doc.close()

split_and_convert(input_pdf, output_jpg)